74 NATURAL SCIENCE. February. 



philosophers, of attacking morphologists. We know of no ground for 

 these accusations. What Natural Science is founded to attack is 

 bad work, what it has always laboured to defend and promote is good 

 ivorh. The day on which this Review ceases to distribute praise and 

 blame, wrongly perhaps, but without fear or favour, will be the day on 

 which it ceases to exist. 



The Scientific Arrangement of Insect Collections. 



Another good result of the discussion in The Entomologist has 

 been the appearance in the October number of that journal of a paper 

 by Mr. W. Harcourt Bath, entitled " Should the formation and 

 arrangement of a collection of insects be made subservient to the 

 elucidation of scientific problems ? " For his answer the author 

 describes the plan of his own collection. The two subjects to which 

 he rigidly confines his study are Distribution and Variation, with 

 special reference to the Rhopalocera, European and Exotic. These 

 subjects can be studied side by side, and the formation and arrange- 

 ment of the collection made with reference to the two at the same 

 time. At present attention is confined to the two zoological sub- 

 regions in which Europe is included, and these are divided further 

 into provinces and sub-provinces, which again are divided vertically 

 into climatological zones. Mr. Bath's aim is to obtain a series of 

 every species possible from each of these subdivisions, the series to 

 be first typical, and then illustrative of variation and seasonal 

 dimorphism. For the elaborate and ingenious method of arrange- 

 ment and labelling employed, we must refer our readers to The 

 Entomologist; and we need only quote the author's words, " it affords 

 me much pleasure, from an intellectual point of view, which I did 

 not dream of when I contented myself with being a ' mere collector.'" 



The general question raised by Mr. Harcourt Bath is of such 

 wide and practical interest that we hope room may be found in our 

 contemporary for further discussion of it. It is clear that specimens 

 of any kind, arranged in some logical order, are more likely to 

 ■elucidate problems than those arranged on no scientific plan ; more- 

 over, the superiority of specimens to elaborate descriptions, even to 

 tabulated statements, is apparent at a glance. Evidence of the value 

 of Mr. Bath's method is aff"orded by his paper in the November 

 number of the same journal " On the vertical distribution and 

 derivation of the Rhopalocera in the Pyrenees." Of course each 

 individual collector will have his own predilections, problems, and 

 arrangement ; the more diverse their points of view, the better. But 

 when the collections of public museums come to be considered, the 

 case is altered. We do not mean that they should have no scientific 

 arrangement ; bvit it seems to us that in each case the arrangement 

 must primarily be systematic. At the British Museum the Lepidop- 

 tera are arranged according to a classification based on the latest 



