84 THE ENTOMOLOGIST, 



glaringly contrasts with them? The mere facts were enough; 

 why ask for reasons ? so they were created in the beginning, so 

 they would remain to the end ; the only part for these 

 students of Nature was to silently accept such arrangements as 

 they found extant, — recondite speculation into their meaning 

 and origin seemed to them to belong to a sphere into which 

 it was almost impious, and certainly useless, to attempt to 

 penetrate. 



And the systematists, the workers in the study and the 

 museum more than in the field, fared still worse. The observers 

 did their work well, and laid foundations of solid knowledge 

 which have since endured ; but they were content with too little. 

 The systematists started from the first from defective premises. 

 Consider the endlessly complicated system of Stephens or of 

 Westwood, and the elaborately symmetrical one of McLeay and 

 Swainson, with their equal series of pentagons throughout all 

 animated nature. What vast ingenuity, what endless toil ! The 

 whole the result of the hopeless endeavour to treat Nature as on 

 one plane. Entangled and confused by their futile attempts to 

 reduce all creation to some iron-bound theoretical conformity, 

 they missed the inner meaning of half the phenomena they were 

 investigating; embryology in our sense of the word gave them 

 no light, and all those variations from type and deviations 

 from the normal, which are such an interest, such a delight, 

 and so suggestive to us, to entomologists of this period were 

 nothing better than an embarrassment and a nuisance, un- 

 accountable and unmeaning freaks of Nature, which refused to 

 fall into their systems, and even threatened that stability and 

 independence of specific form which was the root idea of all their 

 theories. 



Now if I seem to lay too heavy a stress on the defects of the 

 older Entomologists, let it be seen that my purpose is to demon- 

 strate, if possible, how wider, fuller, more really scientific, what 

 I venture to call the Neio Entomology is than the old ; what I 

 mean by the old Entomology I date from the birth of the study 

 as a distinct department of Zoology, or from the time of Latreille 

 to the death of Edward Newman, whom I regard as typifying 

 almost the last of the old school. 



And one consideration strikes me at this point, that is, that 

 the Neiv^ Biology, which of course dates from the publication of 

 the ' Origin of Species,' by no means synchronizes with the Ne^v 

 Entomology. The contrast is indeed rather noteworthy between 

 the comparatively little use Darwin himself made of inferences 

 drawn from Entomology in original support of his theory, and 

 the vast mass of confirmatory evidence since supplied by that 

 branch of study. As a matter of fact I think the Entomologists 

 of the fifties and sixties were too busy describing new species, 

 formulating new genera, investigating insect morphology for the 



