123 



"If wc will expect pevfeclion in any scientific work, we must not be surprised if 

 our expectations arc disappointed. 



" But, on the other hand7 whilst takinc^ gre^l care to keep our minds iinhiassed by 

 the various statements, lest they should be untrue, it is not necessary that we devote 

 our whole attention to the detectiqn and exposure of the enors we may notice. The 

 object of some writers would appear to be not so much to advance science, as to prove 

 that another eminent man has made a blunder. Those who act on this principle are 

 little aware how excessively puerile and petty such conduct appears to the lookers-on: 

 ' wise in their own conceits,' they pause not to notice how others view the matter; and 

 yet I believe there is hardly an instance on record where one writer pullinf^ another to 

 pieces has not been more blamed for his malicious intent than praised for his clever- 

 ness. Even scientific men have some feeling left, and the heart is more thought of 

 than the head. 



" If a book be i-ead and studied without any view to depreciate the writer, and with- 

 out any undue assumption that every assertion contained in it is true, ii;ood must 

 result to the student: he reads in a teachable spirit, and without a blind following of 

 the author as though he were an infallible guide. 



" It is a very serious question how this disposition of the student may be best pro- 

 duced and encouraged. If we admit that it is almost a sine qua non to true learning, 

 it becomes of the first importance that this teachable spirit should early obtain its 

 fullest development. 



"All thorough students, in almost any department of science, will find that this is 

 the spirit which has grown upon them in the progress of their scientific investigations ; 

 and each must regret that in the outset of his career he had not had the benefit of the 

 advice of his seniors to assist him in an earlier attainment of it; for, however true it 

 may be that ' we never learn but from our own experience,' still, if we are continually 

 hearing of the experiences of others, it enables us to derive profit far more rapidly from 

 our own. 



" The desire to learn is, I believe, more general than we are disposed to think ; 

 but the want of the art of learning is with many the stumbling-block. How that art 

 is to be acquired, I am not prepared to say. 



" But my object is not to write a voluminous paper on a subject which is not ex- 

 clusively entomological, and which on that account may be open to objection, as not 

 adapted to the ' Transactions ' of the Society ; I have simply been desirous of calling 

 attention (and I hope I have made myself in some degree intelligible even to the least 

 advanced) to one of the greatest helps to progress in the pursuit of scientific study. 



"I am perfectly aware that some of the unlearned may advance the suggestion, 

 ' What's the use of writing books, and giving us the trouble of reading them, if the 

 half of them is untrue ?' and to these objectors I cannot better reply than in the words 

 of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, on tlie occasion of his laying the first stone of 

 the Birmingham and Midland Institute, on the 22nd of last month: — 



"'It is sometimes objected by the ignorant that science is uncertain and change- 

 able, and they point to the many exploded theories which have been superseded by 

 others as a proof that the present knowledge may be also unsound, and after all not 

 worth having. But they are not aware that, while they think to cast blame upon 

 science, they bestow in fact the highest praise upon her. For that is precisely the 

 difference between science and prejudice; that the latter keeps stubbornly to its posi- 

 tion, whether disproved or not, whilst the former is an unarrestable movement towards 



y 



