( xlvii ) 



danger yet ; I dare say you are most of you acquainted with 

 the genus Heematopota in Diptera ! — well, it is an exceedingly 

 difficult thing to name a British or European species of 

 Hssmatopota, because we meet with them in hundreds, though 

 only in three or four species, but it is easy to name a South- 

 African Hsematoj^ota because we have so few specimens for 

 examination that almost each specimen can be clearly dis- 

 tinguished from the others. I prophesy that when we have 

 hundreds of specimens of North- African, Mid-African, and 

 South-African Ha^matopota, Ave shall be infinitely less certain 

 about the nomenclature than we are now. It is only by the 

 accumulation and examination of long series of specimens that 

 difficult groups of species can be effectually dealt with. 



There is another most extreme advantage that British 

 Entomologists possess now as compared with the first half 

 of the century, and that is the difference which was caused 

 by a very few individuals who reduced chaos to symmetry. 

 Any one who attempted to work at British Coleoptei'a before 

 the publication of the late G. R. Waterhouse's " Catalogue of 

 British Coleoptera," which appeared in 1858, will know 

 the absolute revolution which enabled the British student to 

 escape from the awful labyrinth of synonymy which had 

 previously almost hopelessly checked any advance to the 

 comparative subsequent symmetry ; but since that date the 

 study of Coleoptera in Britain has advanced by leaps and 

 bounds, until I believe that it is now as fully advanced as in any 

 country in the world. Again, in Lepidoptera it seems impos- 

 sible to realise the jumble of genera which existed, especially 

 in the Micro-Lepidoptera, until the late H. T. Stainton began 

 to study them in conjunction with a number of European 

 workers and several enthusiastic English helpers. Stainton, 

 like Waterhouse, attacked the most difficult and neglected 

 groups, but at the same time both of them endeavoured to put 

 their wholo order into symmetrical shape, and it may clearly 

 be said that the honour is due to those two men above all others 

 that the two most conspicuous orders of Insects have become 

 so well arranged and so much studied in Britain. It was a 

 close race between those two men in arranging those two great 

 orders : Waterhouse was born in 1810, and published his first 



