560 
country. Now, these gentlemen from 
abroad have access to all of our publica- 
tions; can read of what we do and how we 
do it. They could probably read up and 
go before an examiner and get an excellent 
grading on their replies, yet it is signifi- 
eant that a practical business man should 
think this insufficient, so much so that he 
willingly pays the expenses of such men to 
enable them to get into closer touch and 
see for themselves how investigations are 
carried on, the facilities required and the 
methods employed in their use. 
There is another phase of our present- 
day entomology that, in passing, I wish to 
note, and that is the great desire among 
systematists for the examination of types, 
the desire to see and handle the precise 
insect that Say, Harris, LeConte, Grote 
and others, both at home and abroad, had 
before them when they described a species 
and gave it a technical name. Men will 
travel hundreds of miles, and visit foreign 
lands in order to do this. Now, all of the 
descriptions of these are in print, all can 
be committed to memory and a man with 
ordinary intelligence could go into a class- 
room and pass a most excellent if not in- 
deed a perfect examination, all that you 
could possibly require of a student. Does 
not this of itself show clearly that, whether 
it be a university student of twenty or 
thereabout, or an independent student, 
official or amateur, of thrice that age, he 
must study the things themselves? You 
ean not make up-to-date entomologists 
within the walls of a classroom. 
Dropping, for the time being, the sub- 
ject of present conditions in the matter of 
progress, let us take up the educational 
system under which the men who are yet to 
come into action are to be educated. 
Coming from an era when oral instruc- 
tion and memorizing were imperative, 
through an era when the educated were the 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 902 
priest, the astrologer, the alchemist and the 
philosopher, with a few of the nobility, the 
remainder being illiterate and therefore 
ignorant and brutal, when that now power- 
ful educator, the public press, was as yet 
unknown, and the almost equally power- 
ful educator, the public library, was in- 
accessible to all but the few, this system 
has come down to our radically differ- 
ent twentieth-century civilization, unfor- 
tunately, deplorably intact. Indeed, what 
was once a necessity has now become sadly 
perverted. Once, the student must of 
necessity listen and memorize with exact- 
ness what was told him, and pass a most 
rigid examination. Now, however, the ob- 
ject appears to be to get the student to 
remember long enough to pass his examina- 
tion. It is of such that Huxley says: 
““They work to pass, not to know; and out- 
raged science takes her revenge. They do 
pass, and they don’t know.’’ Count Leo 
Tolstoi years ago wrote that he had become 
convinced that written or verbal examina- 
tions were a relic of medieval scholastic 
superstition, and that in the present order 
of things, they are decidedly impossible 
and only harmful. And, again, Huxley 
says, in his twenty years’ experience as an 
examiner, from boys and girls of element- 
ary schools to candidates for honors and 
fellowships, that it was a clear case of 
familiarity breeding contempt, and his ad- 
miration did not wax warmer as he saw 
more and more of its workings. In his 
opinion, examination is a good servant but 
a bad master, and he expressed the fear 
that it would sooner or later come to be the 
master. 
But, you will ask, what has all of this to 
do with the entomologist, whom you have 
hardly mentioned? Practically nothing, 
gentlemen, for the reason that from the 
age of six years, when he entered the pri- 
mary school, until he is eighteen or twenty, 
