34 



there over thousands of square miles— that man is scientific, and 

 doing scientific work. 



It is quite clear, from the enormous ground covered by our sub- 

 ject, that to do good work a man must specialise in some particular 

 branch. This may, according to the taste of the individual, be the 

 systematic, the biological, or the philosophical; for it appears to us that 

 all the side branches ultimately resolve themselves into one or other 

 of these main stems. The first two branches have had an existence 

 as long as the science of entomology itself; the last is naturally the 

 product of our modern methods, and is only possible to men of 

 special intellectual capacity, who have had excellent preliminary 

 training, and are able at once to make observations and to draw logical 

 deductions from the facts observed. 



We can go back for at least one hundred and fifty years, and find 

 systematic entomologists sharply and distinctly separated from the 

 biologists. The ignorance of the old entomologists who worked out 

 the biology of our insects is profound so far as relates to their know- 

 ledge of the names and affinities of insects. None of their insects 

 bore names, and their work is not always, therefore, cjf that special 

 value that it otherwise might be. But if Reaumur, Sw^ammerdam, 

 and the other pioneers in insect biology were not systematists, very 

 certain indeed it is that the early systematists were not biologists ; 

 and this distinction lasted more or less until the last quarter of a cen- 

 tury. True it is that in the meantime some systematists had begun 

 to add notes on the life-histories of certain of the species, but such 

 notes were generally intended to help the field collector to name his 

 captures in their early stages, and had no real scientific value ; and, 

 of course, books of this kind are published up to the present day. 



During the last fifty years, however, the distinction between the 

 biologist and the systematist has to a certain extent broken down. 

 This may be in part due to the improvement in the general education 

 of a large part of those who give their attention to the study of ento- 

 mology ; it may be also in part due to the great improvement and to 

 the more general diffusion of scientific meth(;ds of work, and it may be 

 due to the fact that it is now^ more generally recognised that a know- 

 ledge of the other branches of the science leads to a better compre- 

 hension of the special branch to which the student is attached. This 

 is proved to have been so in the case of those who have been most 

 successful in the study of the more philosophical branches of ento- 

 mology, almost all the most eminent thinkers having had a pre- 

 liminary training as systematists and biologists. 



No longer, then, do those who study the biological problems 

 relating to insects form, as it were, a group of scientific men quite 

 apart from the systematists, nor are the latter absolutely ignorant of 

 the broad facts of the anatomy and physiology of the insects they 

 study. The time, too, has to a great extent gone by when the philo- 

 sophical student was looked upon with contempt by the biologist and 

 systematist, and vice ve7'sa. The number and abundance of species, 



