THE NEW ENTOMOLOGY. 83 



of a subsection of Nature, a family of the Coleoptera, the Fauna 

 of an islet. 



To Linnaeus the stupendous task of the entire classification 

 of organic nature did not seem too vast or too laborious. 



Later still we find naturalists who were content to be Ento- 

 mologists merely, and shrank from annexing the whole of created 

 life for their province. Such were the Scandinavians Schonherr, 

 Gyllenhall, and DeGeer ; Fabricius, the Dane ; and above all 

 Latreille, the French abbe. It was the work of such men as 

 these wbich consolidated and shaped the study of insects into an 

 accredited dej^artment of Zoology, and formed the framework of 

 our modern Entomology. This was in the early years of the 

 present century ; and among all the nations of Europe, but 

 more especially among the Teutonic peoples, the study was culti- 

 vated by a few observers who — although they added much to the 

 great mass of ascertained knowledge — earned, generally speaking, 

 but a mild contempt from their public, not so much because the 

 objects of their care were in themselves unworthy or puerile, as 

 because they lacked that touch of the transcendental fire of 

 science which redeemed the efforts of the astronomer and the 

 physicist. 



For consider how the standpoint of all these workers, from 

 Fabricius down to Edward Newman, differed from or fell short 

 of ours ; and great names they were in their generation, and 

 much solid knowledge and irrefutable information we owe to 

 their endeavours — Marsham, McLeay, Kirby and Spence, West- 

 wood, Curtis, Stephens, Doubleday, Newman, Stainton, to cite 

 only a few, and these our own countrymen. 



Now consider for a moment, and with all respect to such past 

 masters in Entomology, how limited was their sense of the 

 domain they were investigating. They may all be divided roughly 

 into two great categories — observers such as Newman and Kirby, 

 systematists like McLeay or Westwood. Of course the majority 

 were both ; but we can separate the result of their labours, at 

 any rate, under these two heads. Yet these observers, patient 

 and reliable as were their researches, valuable as was the know- 

 ledge of Nature they acquired and bequeathed to us, never 

 seemed to trouble themselves about the meaning, the 7vhy of 

 phenomena, the how ; the methods of things were enough for 

 them. They desired simple facts, and enquired no deeper, 

 sought no further into the reality which might underlie the 

 apparent. 



Was the habitat of Erehia epiphron or Miscodera arctica only 

 the barren mountain tops ? Was one insect restricted to a single 

 island or tropic river valley, and another, like Vanessa cardui, 

 abundant from China to Peru? Does one form correspond in 

 perfect harmony of colour with its surroundings, while another 



g2 



