(rte) 
consumes time, entails trouble, and also, which is perhaps the 
most serious matter, requires additional space in a collection ; but 
is the additional cabinet-room required too great a tax, having 
regard to the great increase which necessarily takes place in the 
utility of the collection? I apprehend that no one who seriously 
tries the plan Iam propounding would afterwards feel disposed 
to abandon it, under the impression that the “ bother ” was more 
than its worth. 
One point to which I attach great importance myself is the 
cumulative evidence that would in this way be obtainable on the 
habits and food-plants of species. The capture of single speci- 
mens sometimes only seems to perplex us, for a species may be 
suspected to feed on some particular plant, and we do not happen 
to meet with it just where, by this theory, we ought to expect to 
find it, and if we never have the good fortune to take this par- 
ticular rarity again, no progress seems to have been made. 
But now, suppose that we were to be looking through twenty 
different collections, each of which only contained a solitary 
specimen of this rarity, in some instances taken ‘‘on palings”’ 
or ‘‘ trunks of trees,” or ‘‘ flying along hedges,” or “‘ attracted by 
light,” yet should it so happen that, among the twenty labels 
which we studied in our researches, eight out of the twenty 
single specimens had been taken on some particular plant, the 
cumulative evidence thus obtained would be far stronger than if 
one person had happened to take six specimens from that special 
plant. 
It may well be that other benefits would accrue from the 
continued and persistent habit of labelling, which we do not at 
present value, for it will frequently happen that the steady pur- 
suit of any system will after a time develop results which no one 
had in the first instance anticipated. 
When James Francis Stephens penned that short note in 
1847, he perhaps scarcely anticipated it would have been so 
productive of good results, as I believe it to have been; and pro- 
bably it never occurred to him that thirty years after his decease 
it would serve as the text for a Presidential Address at the 
Entomological Society. 
