xlviii 



In a moral point of view the effect ought to be to teach him good- 

 humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting 

 for himself, aud of making the best of every occurrence ; in 

 short, he ought to partake of the characteristic qualities of most 

 sailors. Travelling ought also to teach him distrust ; but at the 

 same time he will discover how many truly kind-hearted people 

 there are with whom he- never before had, or ever again will 

 have, any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him 

 the most disinterested assistance." 



A few words in conclusion with reference to the tendency, now 

 perhaps decaying but scarcely yet extinct among us, of describing 

 species from insufficient materials. In turning over the pages of 

 any of the older authors one cannot fail to notice that points 

 which were much overlooked by them are these : — 1st, the range 

 of variation of a species in specimens from a single locality ; and 

 2nd, the range of variation of a species in a series of widely 

 separated localities. 



To take the case of a travelled entomologist, who had never 

 even left Europe, yet if he collected the same insect in twenty 

 different " localities from St. Petersburg to Lisbon he would thus 

 learn more of its multitudinous phases than by any amount of 

 cabinet-hunting . 



In the course of my life I have described many species from 

 single specimens, but I now look back upon such conduct as the 

 follies of my younger days, for, if you have only a single speci- 

 men before you, your knowledge of its range of variation is 

 literally nil; and who knows whether the solitary specimen you 

 have before you is an extreme variation on the one side or on the 

 other, or whether it represents the normal character of the 

 species ? 



Probably it would be a good plan to restrain our describing 

 ardour — this furor describendi — till we have before us, at least, 

 from twenty to thirty specimens of the species. We should 

 thereby avoid many errors, and also much lessen the labours of 

 posterity, who will often fail in the attempts to decipher our 

 unsatisfactory descriptions. I can imagine that it may be urged 

 that if A abstains from describing because he feels he lacks 

 a sufficiency of material, B, who is not restrained by any such 

 conscientiousness, will rush to the front and attain pr'writi) ; 



