82 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



perhaps, worth while considering how and to what extent the 

 advent of the science has affected and shaped the course of the 

 study. 



I said there was an Entomology before Biology began to be — 

 that simply means that the observation of a particular part of 

 animated nature necessarily preceded the intellectual compre- 

 hension of such observations and their fusion into some ordered 

 theory of life ; in other words, we must have the observer before 

 the theorist, the quarryman before the architect, although the 

 theorist and the architect may be the greater. Thus our first 

 Entomologists were simply observers who recorded what they 

 saw witbout troubling themselves with problems which seemed 

 to them insoluble, or theories which appeared baseless or 

 unnecessary. 



Now the beginnings of the systematic observation of Nature 

 are lost in the night of ages. Perhaps, bad we that missing 

 work of the great Israelitish Sultan, which — so we are told by 

 the author of ' The New Atlantis ' — was preserved among the 

 archives of the city of Bensalem, we might find the first entomolo- 

 gical treatise. Solomon certainly appears to have observed to 

 some purpose the laborious commonwealth of the ants, and 

 evidently knew more about Arachne than did Ovid, although the 

 Eoman poet supplies us with particulars of her evolution in a more 

 dramatic form. However, as that monarch's detailed notes on 

 Natural History are unfortunately lost beyond hope of recovery, 

 we must turn from the Semite to the Greek, and find in Aristotle 

 the first mind of the ancient days who seemed to consider the 

 natural world at all worth investigation. Nor will I detain you 

 long with the great Stagirite, although few intellects of wider 

 grasp have appeared on the human stage, and although he must 

 ever be the patron saint of all who lean to the scientific method 

 of enquiry into natural phenomena. For Aristotle was the first 

 to demonstrate that Nature was an entity, in itself worth investi- 

 gation, — that, besides art or the apprehension of the beautiful, 

 there was another and a worthier function of the human facul- 

 ties, science or the apprehension of the true : this was his great 

 service to all time, and not the record of any particular observa- 

 tion or experiments. 



From Aristotle to Gesner, the Swiss, seems a far cry, a sweep 

 of some eighteen centuries. Yet in the interval no name stands 

 out conspicuously that of a naturalist. Conrad Gesner was the 

 first whose mind, touched by that rising intellectual tide which 

 we call the Renaissance, took the direction of the study of 

 Nature. The work was carried on by the Dutch Swammerdam, 

 the English Ray, and the great Swede Karl Linne, commonly 

 known as Linnaeus. These were the days of the Encycloptedic 

 systematists. A modern naturalist, such as that typified by 

 Dr. Holme's Scaribee, finds the work of a lifetime in a department 



