75 
of publication for these monographs and partly to the appropriate 
channel afforded by the Society, which first gave natural selection to 
the world in 1858, but it probably also indicates that the Ento- 
mological Society was not at that date exactly a congenial home for 
the free discussion and subsequent publication of such hypotheses. I 
well remember, about the year 1875, when I was an undergraduate, the 
gravity and, indeed, almost consternation with which Professor West- 
wood, when he enquired what I was studying, received my reply 
that I was reading the Origin of Species. He told me that it was a 
book which so young a man ought not to read except under the most 
careful guidance, and he seemed to think that there was some failure 
of duty or, at any rate, some want of caution in my being allowed to 
have the book all! 
The great change in relation to these opinions which has gradually 
come over the Society and over British entomology generally is espe- 
cially due to the energy, zeal, and ability of a single man. Darwin 
described Huxley as his « general agent’; in relation to entomology 
his agent was Raphael Meldola. He became a member of the Society 
in 1872, was elected on the Council in 1874 and 1875, becoming 
Secretary in 1876, an office which he retained till 1880. In 1884 he 
was a Vice-President, and on the Council in 1885. I do not refer to 
the offices he has held at a later date, because the struggle was then 
practically over. Throughout the whole of the period included between 
the above-mentioned dates, and especially during his tenure of the office 
of Secretary, he was unremitting in his efforts to interest the Society 
in evolution and natural selection as applied to the problems of insect 
life and structure. Darwin received many letters from Dr. Fritz 
Muller containing most interesting and suggestive observations. These 
were translated by Meldola and brought before the Society. In 1879 
he brought before the Society, and published i in the Proceedings (p. XxX), 
a translation of Fritz Miuller’s paper, which had only just appeared in 
Kosmos (May, 1879, p. 100), making known his suggestion as to. the 
reason for resemblances between protected species in the hypothesis 
which has since been known as Miillerian mimicry, or the hypothesis 
of common warning or synaposematic colours. This new sug- 
gestion he sustained even against H. W. Bates, who had himself 
suggested the older theory of mimicry, and later against W. L. 
Distant. In 1882 (Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., Dec.) he extended the 
suggestion to explain broader resemblances between the species of 
distasteful groups generally. The outcome of his energy has been that 
the Mullerian suggestion has produced far more effect here than in its 
native country, and that the natural centre for controversy for the 
discussion of such questions shifted from the Linnean to the Ento- 
mological Society. In 1882 Meldola published a translation of Weis- 
mann’s Studies in the Theory of Descent, which had also been brought 
before his notice by Darwin, who, indeed, suggested the English 
edition. ‘This work has strong personal interest to the present writer 
inasmuch as it was the cause of his gradual absorption in the problems 
of insect bionomics, and abandonment of the histological researches on 
the lower Mammalia upon which he had up to that time been engaged. 
When we enquire as to the effect produced by these changes upon 
the direction and scope of entomological enquiry, the answer is both 
interesting and in many ways curious and unexpected. The result 
has been a return of the spirit which animated the older enquirers 
