52 



tory upon a systematic plan. His work on plants and animals appeared 1550 to 1565, 

 but he does not seem to have written on insects. At this time the discoveries of the 

 Dutch and Portuguese in Asia, and above all, those of the Spanish and English in America, 

 oould not fail to draw attention to the brilliant tropical butterflies, and in the seventeenth 

 century the European museums, especially those of Amsterdam and Leyden, already con- 

 tained collections of them, The discovery of the microscope, which, though claimed by 

 Italy, may well be Dutch, turned the attention of naturalists to the study of insects, no 

 less than to physiology, and the works of Malpighi, Leeuwenhoeck, Ray, Swammerdam, 

 Reaumur, were in turn given to the world. At the beginning of the eighteenth century 

 (1719) a Dutch woman, Madam Sibylla Merian, published an immense quarto book with 

 plates on the insects of Surinam, especially figuring the butterflies and moths, and this 

 work was well known to Linnaeus, and seems to have excited and inspired his entomo- 

 mological studies, as he frequently alludes to it and cites the figures which are, however, 

 but coarsely executed. I have named the Hawk Moth (Dilophonota Merianae), which 

 occurs in Texas, Mexico and Cuba, after this accomplished lady and intrepid naturalist, 

 whose travels at that early period were undertaken at much personal inconvenience, and 

 whose enthusiasm seems to have carried her through many obstacles. I like to think 

 that in science we owe much to the gentler sex ; it is certain that Madam Merian in her 

 American and, much later, Frau Lienig in her European collections, gave great impetus 

 to the study of butterflies and moths. This interest of woman, in all that concerns man 

 is only natural, and if we look around us to-day we shall see that it continues in the 

 matter of entomology. 



With the middle of the eighteenth century appeared the works of the Swedish 

 naturalist Linne", or Linnaeus, and the principles of modern nomenclature in Natural 

 History were founded. Linne" is the inventor of the system of binomial nomenclature, 

 that system by which each species or kind of animal or plant receives a double Latin or 

 Latinized name, the first being that of the genus to which the species belongs, the second 

 that of the species to which the individual belongs. Under the law of priority the first 

 such name proposed in print for a species, and which is accompanied by means for its 

 adequate identification, remains its proper specific title, although, owing to our shifting 

 conclusions as to the limit of genera, the first of the two names, or the generic title, may 

 become changed. In this way a durable system of nomenclature is being gradually pre- 

 pared for all kinds of plants and animals and the command given to Adam is being 

 practically carried out. Owing to the inability of certain writers to express themselves 

 intelligibly, or their want of experience, some names fall by the way and are lost. The 

 sticklers for the law of priority are at great pains to construct a hospital for these defec- 

 tive or forgotten titles, and some confusion and quarrelling results from the effort to 

 reinstate them in their undoubted right. But argument of some sort or another is the 

 natural mental exercise of man, and literary disputations of this kind are among the 

 most harmless. 



The thought which culminated in the system of Linnaeus is probably very old. The 

 ostensible father of the philosophical view which produced it is Aristotle, who seems to 

 have held to the opinion that each animal had always reproduced itself after its kind. 

 The world, started after a certain fashion, remained true to the original impulse. And 

 the Creator or Creators of the universe was God or the Deities, according as the belief in 

 the unity or plurality of the supernatural prevailed. "We have in this way a chain of 

 naturalists from ancient times, of which certain prominent links were Aristotle, Gesner, 

 Linnaeus, Cuvier, Agassiz. But from quite early times another school of thought had 

 arisen which taught that this is a world of change, and that the animals and plants of 

 to-day are essentially different from those of former times and will in their turn give 

 place to others in all probability; that there has been no original creation out of nothing 

 and that the formation of new kinds of plants and animals is the result of certain 

 natural laws equivalent to those governing inorganic nature. The links in this chain 

 are Democritus, Lucretius, Averroes, Oken, Lamarck, Wallace, Darwin, Spencer. Here 

 it is not necessary to enter into the matter any further than the subject demands. For 

 a hundred years after Linnaeus, from whose tenth edition of the Systema Natune (1758) 

 the study of the species of butterflies and moths practically commences, Entomologists 



