Rema ies, T PES enc, Wee ee eer on Petes, NG a Ce Sa nen a ah i ra Bei ORERE 
Y oh it d S 7 js a} f E 
. 
428 NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY. 
Even a Species Plantarum, now that their number at the lowest _ 
estimate exceeds one hundred thousand, has become almost hope- 
less. The last attempt, De Candolle’s Prodromus, has been nearly 
forty years in progress, the first portion has become quite out of 
date, and all we can hope for is that it may be shortly completed 
for one of the three great classes of plants. Animals might have 
been more manageable were it not for the insects. Mammalia esti- 
mated at between two and three thousand living species, birds at 
about ten thousand, reptiles and amphibia under two thousand, 
fishes at about ten thousand, crustacea and arachnida rather above 
ten thousand, malacozoa about twenty thousand, vermes, actinozoa, 
and amorphozoa under six thousand, would each by themselves not 
‘impose too heavy a tax on the naturalist experienced in that 
special branch who should undertake a scientific classification and 
diagnosis of all known species. In one important branch, indeed, 
the fishes, this work has been most satisfactorily carried out in Dr. 
Giinther’s admirable Genera and Species of all known fishes pub- 
lished under the misleading title of “Catalogue of the Fishes in 
the British Museum,” and recently completed by the issue of the 
eighth volume. The sound philosophical views expressed in his 
preface to that volume (which, by some strange inversion, bears a 
signature not his own) can be appreciated by us all, and zoologists 
are all agreed as to the care with which they have been worked 
out in the text. Insects are, however, the great stumbling-block 
of zoologists. The number of described species is estimated by 
Gerstaecker at above one hundred and sixty thousand, viz. : Co- 
leoptera, ninety thousand; Hymenoptera, twenty-five thousand; 
Diptera, twenty-four thousand ; Lepidoptera, twenty-two to twen- 
ty-four thousand. Mr. Bates thinks that, for the Coleoptera at 
least, this estimate is too high by one-third, but even with that — 
deduction the number would exceed that of plants, and it is prob- 
able that the number of as yet undiscovered species in proportion — 
to that of the described ones is far greater in the case of insects — 
than of plants. We can therefore no longer hope for a Genera — 
and Species of insects, the work of a single hand, or indeed guided — 
by a single mind. The great division of labor, however, now 
prevalent among entomologists may procure it for us in detail, 
with one drawback only, that the smaller the portion of the great 
natural class of Arthropoda to which the entomologist confines his 
attention, the less he will be able to appreciate the significance of | 
