4224 Entomological Society. 



sophical ; it is not in accordance with the catholicity of science ; it 

 implies that we are drawing a comparison between ourselves and 

 others disadvantageous to those others, and it therefore has a direct 

 tendency to foster, if not to create, feelings that ought not to exist. 

 The Lepidopterist, the Dipterist, the Hymenopterist, or Coleopterist ; 

 the systematist or the utilitarian ; the student of economy, or the 

 collector ; the man, in fact, who selects, of his free choice, his own 

 particular, favourite objects of study, and yet who presumes to look 

 down on another who has made a different choice, exhibits a want 

 of that philosophical spirit which would assure him that all these 

 work together harmoniously for the general good : all are equally 

 striving after the excelsior of the poet : each is ascending, after his 

 own fashion, the hill of science : and not only must he have perfect 

 liberty to select his own path, but, if he be only industrious, he will 

 establish an indubitable claim to the merit of strewing that path with 

 flowers which any of us may gather. One man studies an insect solely 

 with a view to increase its pecuniary benefit, or diminish its pecuniary 

 injury to man ; another observes the bee building her cells and stor- 

 ing her honey simply as a matter of amusement ; a third watches the 

 Ichneumon as she glides with shivering antennae over the surface of 

 a leaf until she find the larva on whose living flesh her young is des- 

 tined to feed ; a fourth, with greater perseverance and more deter- 

 mined zeal, elaborates the previously unknown history of a single 

 individual from the ovum to the imago ; a fifth, by the aid of micro- 

 scope and scalpel, thoroughly masters the phenomena of intimate 

 structure, tracing every system of organs in its wondrous permeation of 

 the insect frame, and not resting here, carries the physical knowledge 

 thus gained into the wider and still more interesting field of physi- 

 ology ; a sixth spends days and nights in the capture of insects 

 simply induced by their rarity ; a seventh consumes the midnight 

 oil in describing the new or the beautiful or the curious ; an eighth 

 ponders over systematic classification ; a ninth labours to complete 

 a monographic history: all these are hastening to the same termi- 

 nus ; are all, in fact, on their way upwards. We have long since been 

 told that members of the human body must work together in concert : 

 that the head must not say to the hand " I have no need of thee," or 

 the hand to the feet " I have no need of you :" so with our science; 

 the monographer cannot say to the collector, I have no need of you : 

 the very admission of such a thought is a stumbling-block in our own 

 was, a bar to our own progress. I wish to be understood as applying 

 this last observation especially and emphatically to the case of the 



