﻿MONTIPOKA. 17 



While Claiming, then, that the chief divisions of the genus are natural divisions, I can 

 only repeat what was said in the preface to Vol. II. as to the real value of the specific 

 divisions. The types represent merely the more 'marked variations presented by the 

 specimens in the National Collection, and are, therefore, for the most part purely artificial 

 groupings. Only in those cases in which the individual specimens are known to have been 

 collected from the same locality, and might almost be fragments of one and the same colony, 

 does the name imply the close blood-relationship which the word species should be taken to 

 connote. In all other cases, the types are, strictly speaking, only morphological groups, 

 united because of certain peculiarities of form or structure which they have in common. 

 Their ultimate systematic value is thus problematical. How much this is the case, indeed, 

 may be gathered from the fact that the differences presented by specimens which are un- 

 doubtedly specifically identical may be far more striking than those that separate many of 

 the types. 



The influence on the mind of the puzzled worker of such a group of many individuals 

 showing great variations yet undoubtedly specifically identical leads him as a rule tempo- 

 rarily to a wholesale lumping of other specimens, until his courage fails him, when the more 

 striking individual variations are once more separately described as new types. 



