348 Mr. W. Arnold Lewis on 
Lists are, I suppose, divided into synonymic lists and 
labelling lists. Restricted to their proper objects, sy- 
nonymic lists are very useful things; and while entomo- 
logists continue to label their collections, printed labelling 
lists will always play a useful, if a humble, part in the 
world of science. 
A list is a list all the world over, and cannot be a 
treatise. ‘To make a list answer the purpose of a treatise 
is at all events a very slovenly proceeding. But there 
are some functions which a list cannot perform. I am 
concerned only with one. <A bare list cannot state rea- 
sons for results ; it can only catalogue the results them- 
selves. Now, was it ever designed in the institution of 
synonymic lists, that they should be an authority upon 
classification, or the medium for introducing important 
changes in arrangement? Classification is the highest 
incident of scientific study, which requires, if anything 
requires it, a full statement of reasons pro and con., 
research, deliberation, careful discrimination between 
published conclusions. An opimion on a system of 
arrangement, formed without such preparation, would be 
absolutely worthless in a scientific point of view, by 
whomsoever it might be expressed. A list such as Mr. 
Doubleday’s makes no pretence of affording any guide 
for the formation of a judgment, even on the propriety 
of the names; and as to them, rests entirely for its 
acceptability on the reputation of its author. But can it 
be tolerated, that a bare array of names, shaken into a 
certain order, shall be accepted as any authority that that 
order is natural or proper? Surely no list has or can 
have such authority, and there would be a stultification 
of science if it had. When we desire authorities upon 
System, we go to books, written by entomologists, who 
have given reasons for their plan. It has not been 
thought beneath the attention of the men most reverenced 
in science, to devote a studious lifetime to the perfecting 
of systems of classification. The works of those men 
remain, and will remain, the great authorities, though 
stacks of ‘‘ synonymic lists” may leave our printing-offices 
year by year. 
A mere list is not of any value even as corroborating 
or adopting an ewisting arrangement. An arrangement 
of insects depends for its acceptability on its own merits, 
and is no better if a hundred synonymic lists, without 
