154 The Zoologist — April, 1866. 



wise smooth ; very much the same effect is produced by the jolting of 

 parenlheses. This is a mere iiolhinj;;, and detracts little from the 

 value of ihe work; the sun has his spots, but wlio does not acknow- 

 ledge his genial influence. 



In the day out of which we are now passing, it was very much the 

 habit to take nothing for granted; but now we are falling into ihe 

 0]iposite extreme of adopting unquestioned the hypotheses of others, 

 merely because they afford us scientific capital without the trouble of 

 learning; materials for talking without the labour of thinking: and 

 the most remarkable feature in this New Dispensation of Natural 

 History is that we father our flippancies on the most profound and 

 most thoughtful of all living naturalists, even on Mr. Darwin himself. 

 Who amongst us is not continually bored with the puerility, "I don't 

 believe in species; you should read Darwin?" I scarcely know a 

 juvenile naturalist but repeats this cuckoo cry. Now Mr. Wollaston 

 is the man of all others to establish this non-belief in species, if 

 species really do not exist; but we gather another moral from his 

 writings; we learn how greatly a species may vary, and how many 

 causes may conduce to this variation, and yet be a species neverthe- 

 less. It is Mr. Wollaston's peculiar talent to treat this question with 

 a masterly hand. The argument used by our colts is this: take 

 half-a-dozen forms of Carabus, which different entomologists have 

 named albipes, pallipes, rufipes, picipes, fuscipes and nigripes; events 

 occur which prove inconleslibly that albipes is the male of jjallipes; 

 pallipes a pale-legged variety of rufipes; rufipes a geographical form 

 of picipes; picipes an alpine race of fiiscipes; and fuscipes a mere 

 accidental variation of nigripes. Oiu- colt avails himself of the labours 

 of those workers who have established these facts, and cries, "All 

 these species must sink; indeed I don't believe in species at all." 

 Now the thinker would stop half-way; he would argue that "all 

 these species must sink," but he would draw no rash generalization : 

 he would say entomologists had been too hasty in "making" species, 

 that is, in founding them on the altered colour of legs, but he would 

 not conclude that Nature had not made species because man had 

 fumbled in their differentiation. A case in point: at the last Meeting 

 of the Entomological Society Mr. Saunders exhibited a very beautiful 

 series of Heliconia, "all taken in the same locality, and including forms 

 which had been described under seven or eight specific names ; the 

 examination of these specimens had convinced him that all of them 

 were referable to a single species, H. Melpomene, or at most to two 



