The Zoologist— August, 18C7. 845 



Thompson's researches into the metamorphosis of Crustacea, and my 

 own theories on the true place of Stylops among insects, the composi- 

 tion of the thorax in Hymenoptera, and many other matters, have so 

 grand a prototype as this persecution of poor Chamisso. Professors 

 Meyen, Eschricht and Westwood have shown by irresistible argu- 

 ment that such things cannot be, and their labours have received the 

 endorse of the world of Science ; nevertheless the onward progress of 

 observation not only invalidates arguments, but corroborates and 

 enforces facts ; and the results may be safely entrusted to the inquiring 

 spirit of the age in which we live. 



In 1828 Sars made discoveries in the reproduction of Medusae 

 exactly parallel to those of Chamisso. in that of Salpae; and these 

 were corroborated by Siebold in 1837; and in the same year Loven 

 published similar observations on Campanularia. The whole of these 

 researches have since been reproduced and methodized by Steenstrup, 

 and translated into our language by Professor Busk: so that we have 

 the information at our very doors ; and it results, in the words of Steen- 

 strup, " in the remarkable and until now inexplicable natural pheno- 

 menon of an animal producing an offspring which at no time resembles 

 its parent, but which, on the other hand, itself brings forth a progeny 

 which returns in its form and nature to the parent animal, so that the 

 mother does not find her resemblance in her own young, but in their 

 descendants." 



It remains to be stated that in endosteale animals, as the horse, cat, 

 rabbit, pigeon, &c, these alternate generations are always regarded as 

 mere abnormities, while in the lower groups they are received as 

 genera: we have now to trace the same law in exosteates, and there 

 we shall find them recognized as species. 



It may safely be assumed that thousands of our book species of 

 insects are neither more nor less than generations of species or moieties 

 of species or fractional parts of species ; but the subject is one which 

 requires much closer investigation than it has hitherto received, and it 

 is in vain for us to anticipate the day when these facts shall be made 

 manifest by observations : the object of our collectors is to bring home 

 the greatest possible number of individuals, or of so-called species, 

 and when a collector ventures beyond this, and presumes to think and 

 to observe, as well as collect, he seats himself complacently in the 

 Darwinian groove, glides smoothly down into the unfathomable abyss 

 of speculation, and endeavours to show that a butterfly with a spot 

 more or less than usual on its wings, affords a proof that the individual, 



