90 THE entomologist's record. 



and I are the better for having been entomologists, better in health, 

 better in mind, better in an adjustment of the things of this world in 

 their proper perspective, for, after all, this is really the factor that goes 

 for much in an intellectual hobby, viz., the levelling up, as it were, of 

 the mental faculties to compete against the strain and stress of 

 everyday life. Such was, no doubt, the view of Wordsworth, when 

 he wrote — 



" If thou art worn and hard beset 

 With sorrow that thou would'st forget, 

 If thou would 'st learn a lesson, that will keep 

 Thy heart from fainting, and thy soul from sleep, 

 Go to the woods and hills, no tears 

 Dim the sweet look that nature wears." 



But this after all is only the beginning of entomology. The mind like 

 the grosser appetite grows with what it feeds on. The mental position 

 of the child is not that of the youth, nor that of the youth that of the 

 mature man. We have a certain temperament or we should not 

 become entomologists. Do we advance along the line our temperament 

 has marked out for us or do we fall back ? There is no such thing as 

 standing still ; in every branch of scientific study we must either go on 

 or fall back. 



Scientific study ! Yes, that is the evolutionary outcome of ento- 

 mology as a hobby well done. The desire to know, the desire to 

 discover, to pierce the hitherto unknown, to bring into one's immediate 

 surroundings the mental atmosphere of pleasure in knowledge, in 

 discovery, in settling and solving hitherto unsettled and unsolved facts 

 of nature, in impregnating as it were those similarly constituted to 

 oneself with the feeling that this after all makes life worth living, 

 that man, indeed, must have mental as well as physical food. The 

 suggestion, therefore, is after all, that something shall come out of 

 entomology, something that we ourselves gain in the pleasure of getting, 

 something that the world at large gains from our work, for he alone 

 truly lives who does his best work for himself and others. These, I 

 take it, are among the factors that have changed hobbyists into scientific 

 men, that have indeed led all our scientific men along the paths of dis- 

 covery — love of work for its own sake, a desire to do this work as well 

 as it can possibly be done. 



Fifty years ago the collection and orderly arrangemeut of insects 

 were considered to be largely the be-all and end-all of entomological 

 science. Many a man in those days got his F.E.S. on work of this 

 description. With the advent of Darwinism the science of entomology 

 underwent a tremendous change ; the biological outlook became so 

 enlarged, the problems for solution so varied, that biologists turned 

 round to see what practical means could be adopted, what experiments 

 could be made, to test, and prove or disprove, the theories advanced to 

 account for the phenomena that were being investigated, and it was 

 soon found that insects afforded the best means of accumulating facts 

 bearing on many intricate biological problems, not only because they 

 were easy to manipulate, but because the rapidity of their development 

 enabled one to obtain an accumulation of facts in a minimum of time. 

 Hence biological entomology has taken a high, and deservedly high, 

 place in the scientific world ; but its exponents on really scientific lines 

 have been few. It is, indeed, marvellous that so few of the well- 



