liv 



I cannot too strongly press upon microscopical observers the 

 advantages which will accrue to Science by their restricting their 

 researches in some special direction, instead of frittering it away 

 upon an endless variety of objects. 



A matter worthy of much congratulation has been brought to a 

 successful termination during the past year. I allude to the 

 completion of the great Catalogue of detached Memoirs pubhshed 

 in the various scientific Transactions and Periodicals up to the 

 year 1863, taken in hand by the Royal Societ3^ It occupied me 

 a large portion of ten years of the best period of my life to wade 

 through these various works in collecting the materials for my 

 ' Introduction.' Had the Catalogue been then in existence a 

 large amount of this time would have been saved. 



Fossil Entomology. 

 The stud}^ of fossil articulated animals has not hitherto been 

 sufficiently attended to by our systematic entomologists, although 

 it cannot be denied that they are entitled to great weight in a 

 classificational point of view, whether regarded by one class of 

 students (the evolutionists) as the progenitors of the now- 

 existing races, or by another class as the exponents of so many 

 lost links in a great and entire scheme of Creation, where every 

 animal had its real place assigned to it ; in fact, as osculant groups 

 bridging over great gaps in the existing state of the Animal 

 Kingdom. Thus, with reference to the singular fossil bird, 

 Arch£eopter3^x, lately discovered, possessing a long jointed and 

 feathered tail, the latter class of naturalists might, in one point 

 of view, regard it as a link between birds and quadrupeds, whilst 

 the former would simply consider it as one of the progenitors 

 of some race of quadrupeds which had changed its feathers for 

 hairs.* In like manner also the singular fossil aquatic bird from 

 the cretaceous shales of Kansas, of which a preliminar}'^ notice has 



* I am aware of the relationship claimed for the Archreoj^teryx with the Reptiles, 

 but have here treated it as a link between birds and mammals, on the authority of 

 Professor Owen's statements that "in general shape and proportions the tail 

 resembles rather that of a Petanrus or squirrel than that of a modern bird" (Phil. 

 Trans. 1863, p. 30) ; and that "when we recall the single unguiculate digit in the 

 wing of Pteropus and the number of such digits, equalling that in Pterodactj'lus, in 

 the fore foot of the flying lemur (Galeopithecus), the tendency to see only a reptilian 

 character in what may have been the structure of the manus in Archseopteryx 

 receives a due check" (Ibid. p. 40). 



