Sune Ip TOT] 

Darwinian theories, The great thunderbolt had indeed been 
launched, but had not yet produced its full effect. We systema- 
tists, bred up in the doctrine of the fixed immutability of species 
within positive limits, who had always thought it one great 
object to ascertain what those limits were, and by what means 
species, in their never-ending variations and constant attempts to 
overstep those limits, were invariably checked and thrown back 
within their own domain, might at first haye been disposed to 
resist the revolutionary tendency of the new doctrine ; but we felt 
shaken and puzzled. The wide field opened for the exercise of 
speculative tendencies was soon overrun by numerous aspirants, 
a cry of contempt was raised against museum zoologists and 
herbarium botanists, and nothing was allowed to be scientific 
which was not theoretical or microscopical. But this has been 
carried, in some instances, too far. If facts without deductions 
are of little avail, assumptions without facts are worse than useless. 
Theorists in their disputes must bring forth the evidences they 
rely upon, and these evidences can only be derived from and 
tested by sound systematic biology, which must resume and is 
resuming its proper position in the ranks of science, controlled 
and guided in its course by the results of those theories, for which 
it has supplied the basis.* If the absolute immutability of races 
is no longer to be relied upon, the greater number of them 
(whether genera, species, or varieties) are at the present or any 
other geological period, practically circumscribed within more or 
less definite limits. The ascertaining those limits in every detail 
of form, structure, habit, and constitution, and the judicious appre- 
ciation of the very complicated relations born to each other by 
the different races so limited, is as necessary as the supplementing 
the scantiness of data from the depths of Teutonic consciousness 
by the vivid flashes of Italian imagination, or as the mag- 
nifying minute as yet undeveloped organisms, with a precision 
beyond what is fully justified by our best instruments. 
Iam, however, far from denying on the one hand how much 
biological science has of late been raised, since it has been 
brought to bear through well-developed theories and hypotheses 
upon the history of our globe, and of the races it has borne ; and 
on the other, how very much the basis upon which it rests has 
been improved and consolidated by the assiduous use of the 
microscope and the dissecting knife ; but I would insist upon the 
necessity of equal ability being applied to the intermediate pro- 
cess of method or nomenclature and classification, which forms 
the connecting link between the labours of the anatomist and the 
theorist, reducing the observations of the one to forms available 
for the arguments of the other. All three, the minute observer, 
the systematist, and the theorist, thus assisting each other, 
equally contribute to the general advancement of science, and 
for all practical application, the systematist’s share of duty is cer- 
tainly the most important. 
The quicksands to which I have alluded to as besetting thus 
the foundation of biological science, may be classed as imperfect 
data and false data, imperfect method and false method. To 
show what progress is making in removing or consolidating 
them, it may be useful to consider what these data are, and what 
are our means of fixing them so as to be readily available for 
use. 
It must, in the first place, be remembered that the races whose 
relations to each other we study, can only be present to our minds 
in an abstract form. In treating of a genus, a species, or a 
yariety, it is not enough to have one individual before our eyes, 
we must combine the properties belonging to the whole race we 
are considering, abstracted from those peculiar to subordinate races 
or individuals. We cannot forma correct idea of a species from a 
single individual, nor of a genus from a single one of its species. 
We can no more set up a typical species than a typical 
individual. If we had before us an exact individual re- 
presentative of the common parent from which all the 
individuals of a species or all the species of a genus have de- 
scended—or if you prefer it an exact copy of the model or type 
after which the whole species or genus had been created, we 
should have no possible means of recognising it. I once heard 
a lecture of a German philosophical naturalist of considerable 
reputation in his day, in which he thought he proved that the 
common Clover was the type of Papilionaceze. His facts were 
correct enough, but his arguments might have been turned in 
favour of any other individual species that might have been se- 
lected. Suppose two individuals of a species, two species of a 
* The great importance of morphology and classification, the elements of 
systematic biology, has been forcibly illustrated by Prof. Flower in his last 
year’s introductory lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons. 
NATURE 


93 

genus, two genera of a family, in one of which certain organs are 
more developed, more differentiated, or more consolidated than 
in the other, if we agree upon the first question of which is the 
most perfect, a point upon which naturalists seldom do agree, 
how are we to determine which represents the common parent 
or model ? whether the perfect one is an improvement upon, or 
an improved copy, or the imperfect one a degeneracy from or a bad 
imitation of the other? No direct evidence goes beyond a very 
few generations, reasoning from analogy is impossible without 
direct evidence to start from, and the imagining a type without 
either is the business of the poet, not of the naturalist. 
It follows that every such abstract idea of a race must be 
derived from the observation, by ourselves or by others, of as 
large a number of the constituent individuals as possible. How- 
ever fixed a race may be, if fixed at all in Nature, that is not the 
case with our abstract idea of it, no species or genus we establish 
can be considered as absolutely fixed, it will ever have to be-com- 
pleted, corrected, or modified, as more and more indiv duals 
come to be correctly observed. Ience it is, that a species de- 
scribed from a single specimen, and even a genus established on 
a single species, always excites more or less of suspicion unless 
supported by strong reasoning from analogy or confirmed by 
repeated observation. 
Our means of observing and methodising biological facts, of 
establishing and classifying those abstract ideas we call varieties, 
species, genera, families &c., consist in the study (1) of living 
individual organisms; (2) of preserved specimens; (3) of 
pictorial delineations ; and (4) of written descriptions. Each of 
these sources of information has its special advantages, but each 
is attended by some special deficiencies to be supplied by one or 
more of the others. 
I. The study of living individuals in their natural state is with- 
out doubt the most satisfactory, but very few such individuals can 
be simultaneously observed for the purpose of comparison, and 
no one individual, at any one moment, can supply the whole of 
the data required relating even to that individual. Some addi- 
tional facilities in these respects are given by the maintenance of 
collections of living animals and plants, particularly useful in 
affording the means of continuous observation during the various 
phases of the life of one and the same individual, and sometimes 
through successive generations, or ir. facilitating the internal ex- 
amination of organisms immediately after death, when the great 
physiological changes consequent upon death have only com- 
menced. But there are drawbacks and difficulties to be over- 
come, as well as a few special sources of error to be guarded 
against, and in this respect, as well as in the progress recently 
made in their application to science, there is a marked difference 
between zoological and botanical living collections, or so-called 
gardens, 
The great drawback to living collections, especially zoologi- 
cal, is their necessary incompleteness. At the best it is indi- 
viduals only, not species, and in a few cases genera that are 
exposed to observation ; genera, indeed, can always be better 
represented than species, for a few species bear a much larger 
proportion to the total number contained in a genus, than a few 
individuals to the total number which a species contains. Whole 
classes are entirely wanting in zoological gardens, which are 
usually limited to vertebrata. Of late years means have been 
found to include a few aquatic animals of the lower orders, but 
insects, for instance, those animals which exercise the greatest in- 
fluence on the general economy of nature, the observation of 
whose life and transformations is every day acquiring greater 
importance, are wholly unrepresented in zoological gardens. 
The shortness of duration of their individual lives, their enor- 
mous power of propagation, the different mediums in which they 
pass the different stages of their existence, will long be obstacles 
to the formation of living entomological collections on anything 
like a satisfactory scale. The cost also of the formation and 
maintenance of living collections is very much greater in the 
case of animals than of plants ; but on the other hand zoologists 
have the advantage of the attractiveness of their menageries to 
the general unscientific but paying public, and, under judicious 
management, some sacrifices to popular tastes are far outweighed 
by the additional funds obtained towards rendering their collec- 
tions useful to science. 
The false data or errors to be guarded against in the observa- 
tion of living zoological collections are chiefly owing to the un- 
natural conditions in which the animals are placed. Ungenial 
climate, unaccustomed food, want of exercise, &c., act upon their 
temper, habits, and constitution, and confinement materially 
