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What is Science, ?



nowadays every local race must have a third name to indicate which

gradation it belongs to, and even if one race imperceptibly passes

into the next, that is not held to be of importance : to my old-

fashioned mind numerals added to the scientific name would answer

the purpose equally well without cumbering our catalogues and

adding to the labours of Museum students.


Can anything be more disheartening to a young and zealous

worker who visits a large collection for the first time than to discover

that all the names by which he has been taught to know our British

animals, whether vertebrates or invertebrates, have been altered so

as to have become utterly unrecognizable. If this is science we

were better without it.


What used to annoy me, when engaged upon systematic

work in zoology, was that some of the most enthusiastic worshippers

of subspecies made no distinction between the variations of a species

extending over a Continent and frequently linked by intergrades, and

nearly related species separated one from the other by vast tracts of

ocean often of enormous depths, and which consequently must have

been accurately reproducing themselves unchanged for many thou¬

sands of years. In my opinion the first should have been called

either varieties or local races, but the latter true species ; and this

is how I always regarded them. I am certain that a form which

remains the same from one generation to another is entitled to be

called a distinct species, not a sub-species; and that unquestionably

will be the opinion of the coming generation of systematists, whose

tendency already is certainly to split up and name as species all

forms which appear to be constant, frequently I fear on insufficient

evidence.


How is knowledge increased by (let us quote a case) calling

a European bird Corvus corax corctx, an African one Gorvus corax

tingitanus , one from the Canaries C. c. canariensis, and so on ? This

has been done in the case of the common raven, but things more

absurd have been done in the case of butterflies which are widely

separated geographically and show no tendency to grade into one

another. To call such work scientific and the work of aviculturists

unscientific is puerile. Work which adds nothing to our knowledge

may seem clever to some, but it is science falsely so called.



