373 



described up to last yecar from all Australia ; my collection con- 

 tains 22 species. In the Lathridiidcp, the number described up 

 to a couple of years ago was four from all Australia ; my collec- 

 tion contains 18; probably some of the larger collections (the 

 Sydney or Macleay Museum, for example) contain 50 or more. 

 Thus you see that even in one of the most admired orders of 

 insects the mere work of describing the Australian species is still 

 in its infancy. 



It appears, therefcjre, that the contribution towards natural 

 seience, which it falls to the lot of this generation to make, is an 

 accurate statement of facts, whick may serve as reliable data in 

 the future. 



And here I will point out that not only are we of the present 

 clay little, if at all, qualified to attempt higher work, but also 

 that any hope of the accomplishment even eventually of higher 

 work must depend very much on what is done in this generation 

 to provide the required data for our successors. Every day that 

 passes renders those data more difficult to obtain, and less 

 reliable. And that because the work of the world in many of 

 its operations is disturbing the order of Nature. Commerce, for 

 -example, is rendering many other races of animals besides those 

 of man and many plants cosmopolitan. 



Here, too, I call your attention to the fact that Australia is 

 probably of all the continents that in which the most important 

 and reliable observations can be made. It has often been referred 

 to as a remarkable phenomenon that whereas in the Old World— 

 where the country is cut up into well-protected enclosures, by 

 miglity ranges of snow-clad mountains, and by rivers that man 

 himself is almost at a loss to bridge — the vast majority of 

 species are of very wide distribution, many extending their 

 liabitat even from the islands off the West of Europe to those off 

 the East of Asia ; here on this Australian continent of vast and 

 waterless plains, where for hundreds of miles the traveller will 

 meet with nothing that could be called the boundary of a natural 

 •district, where, if an observant man could be set down in suc- 

 cession at any intervals along a line of two thousand miles, from 

 near the east coast in N. S. Wales, to near the west coast in the 

 neighborhood of Perth, he could scarcely decide from the super- 

 ficial features of the country wliether he was not all the time 

 within a mile or two of his starting point — wliere wide distribu- 

 tion of species would seem much more probable than in almost 

 any other region of the world — the precise reverse is tlie case, 

 and there seems to be no other continent wliere fiofe?v species 

 have a wide distribution. 



This exceptionally limited distribution of species, where the 

 reverse might reasonably have been expected, has often been 



