The Making of Species 



Russell Wallace. To-day it is not among 

 Englishmen, but among Americans and Con- 

 tinentals, that we have to look for advanced 

 scientific ideas. 



Even as the Ultra-Cobdenites believe that 

 Free Trade is a panacea for all economic 

 ills, so do most English men of science believe 

 that natural selection offers the key to every 

 zoological problem. Both are living in a 

 fool's paradise. Another reason why Great 

 Britain is losing her scientific supremacy is 

 that too little attention is paid to bionomics, 

 or the study of live animals. Morphology, 

 or the science of dead organisms, receives 

 more than its due share of attention. It is 

 in the open, not in the museum or the dis- 

 secting-room, that nature can best be studied. 

 Far be it from us to deprecate the study of mor- 

 phology. We wish merely to insist upon the 

 fact, that the leaders of biological science must of 

 necessity be those naturalists who go to the 

 tropics and other parts of the earth where nature 

 can be studied under the most favourable con- 

 ditions, and those who conduct scientific breeding 

 experiments. Natural selection the idea which 

 has revolutionised modern biological science- 

 came, not to professors, but to a couple of field- 

 naturalists who were pursuing their researches 

 in tropical countries. It is absurd to expect 

 those who stay at home and gain most of their 



Vlll 



