366 NATURAL SCIENCE. December. 



2,629 plates. 3 In many groups the results of this one expedition have 

 increased the number of known species four- or five-fold. 



The first result of this increase in the number of described forms 

 was to render urgent a broader basis for, as well as a more definite 

 content of, species description, in opposition to the Linnaean methods 

 of systematic description, hitherto adopted, whose only scope was 

 the separation of a new species from those already known, by 

 distinguishing characteristics. One still had to try and grasp 

 the " Specific " of an organism by which it could be distinguished 

 from forms yet to be discovered. This demand, formulated even before 

 Darwin's time by conscientious systematists, is of course difficult, 

 and only to be complied with by one possessing an artistic sense of 

 form. Furthermore, the Darwinians themselves frequently delighted 

 in a wilful neglect of systematics, which arose partly out of contempt 

 for the " hair-and-brush systematics " practised in museums (which 

 was chiefly antagonistic to the new teaching), partly from an 

 exaggerated conception of the variability of species — conceptions that 

 produced the most eccentric phenomena in systematic work. 



Happily, this fermentation period is over ; we are learning to 

 value again exact systematic description, as it has remained chiefly 

 in the too-long neglected science of entomology. We only need to 

 enlarge the methods of the latter by a more extended regard for 

 comparative anatomy and evolution, in order to express ever more 

 and more systematically the natural relationships of organisms. 

 For one thing is sure, that the minute description, customary in 

 entomology, of diagnostically important outward characters has done 

 much less harm than the neglect with which these external characters 

 were treated by the " scientific " zoology of the last decades. To 

 this kind of zoology are due the facts that in modern monographs 

 the systematic parts are often so superficially treated that they are 

 useless to a conscientious zoogeographer, and that German zoology has 

 been not unjustly reproached for bringing forth excellent theorists, 

 and splendid comparative anatomists and embryologists, but no 

 zoologists. As though, forsooth, knowledge of forms were not the 

 foundation of all zoology, and as though one could obtain a living 

 representation of the phenomena of variation without having practised 

 the eye by exact systematic study in at least one group ! Darwin 

 himself gave a pattern of exact systematic description in the mono- 

 graph on the cirripedes'* at a time when the selection theory was 

 already perfectly formulated in his mind. What student of the 



3 " Report on the scientific results of the voyage of H.M.S. ' Challenger,' during 

 the years 1S72-76, under the command of Captain Sir George S. Nares and the late 

 Captain Frank Tourle Thomson. Prepared under the superintendence of the late 

 Sir C. Wyville Thomson, and now of John Murray." 50 Vols., in quarto. 

 London, 1880-95. See also " Challenger" number of Natural Science, July, 1895. 



* Charles Darwin, " A Monograph of the sub-class Cirripedia, with figures of 

 all the species." 2 Vols., London, 1851-54. 



