Early Letters 



To F. Bates 



Ternate. March 2, 1858. 



My dear Mr. Bates, — When I received your very accept- 

 able letter (a month ago) I had just written one to your 

 brother, which I thought I could not do better than send 

 to you to forward to him, as I shall thereby be able to 

 confine myself solely to the group you are studying and 

 to other matters touched upon in your letter. I had heard 

 from Mr. Stevens some time ago that you had begun col- 

 lecting exotic Geodephaga, but were confining yourself to 

 one or two illustrations of each genus. I was sure, how^- 

 ever, that you would soon find this unsatisfactory. Nature 

 must be studied in detail, and it is the wonderful variety 

 of the species of a group, their complicated relations and 

 their endless modification of form, size and colours, which 

 constitute the pre-eminent charm of the entomologist's 

 study. It is with the greatest satisfaction, too, I hail 

 your accession to the very limited number of collectors 

 and students of exotic insects, and sincerely hope you may 

 be sufficiently favoured by fortune to enable you to form 

 an extensive collection and to devote the necessary time to 

 its study and ultimately to the preparation of a complete 

 and useful work. Though I cannot but be pleased that you 

 are able to do so, I am certainly surprised to find that you 

 indulge in the expensive luxury of from three to seven speci- 

 mens of a species. I should have thought that in such a 

 very extensive group you would have found one or, at most, 

 a pair quite sufficient. I fancy very few collectors of exotic 

 insects do more than this, except where they can obtain addi- 

 tional specimens by gift or by exchange. Your remarks on 

 my collections are very interesting to me, especially as I have 

 kept descriptions with many outline figures of my Malacca 

 and Sarawak Geodephaga, so that with one or two exceptions 



