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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLVIII 



systematists ' hands should be. as far as possible, thoroughly ex- 

 amined and described, no dependence being placed upon a few 

 superficial characters usually selected from the external parts? 

 That the systematist should concern himself, as he does, with 

 the external parts, leaving the anatomy to other workers, we 

 consider is as bad for the systematist himself as it is bad for the 

 science ; for himself, he is doing work which can only keep his 

 soul alive with difficulty— superficial clerical work which can be 

 "prompted by no real curiosity and attempts to answer no 

 scientific questions," and the results of the work itself is often 

 invalidated by the arrival of the destroying angel in the person 

 of the anatomist. For a superficial description often means a 

 wrong classification ; whence it follows that any zoo-geographical 

 deductions therefrom are invalidated; while a careless descrip- 

 tion usually ignores the possibilities of variation and shows no 

 evidence of pains having been taken to make identification easy. 



Systematic work, then, is concerned with classification, geo- 

 graphical distribution, variation and identification, and there 

 would be no need for this paper, if it were more generally re- 

 alized that one thorough examination and description of the 

 whole animal assists those branches of the inquiry more than 

 twenty loose and superficial ones. 



Of course systematic workers are not the only zoologists who 

 over-publish; yet they especially might cultivate a little of the 

 salutary reticence of C. L. Nitsch and Alfred Newton, who, with 

 no discredit to themselves, wrote and published little, yet it must 

 be admitted by those with an eye on the extravagant output of 

 others, to the advantage of zoology. The words "res non-verba" 

 were the motto of Delle Chiaje, who, like Nitzsch, on his death 

 left behind many important discoveries unpublished and only 

 indicated in his drawings. 



Classification in General 

 The coming of Evolution meant for systematic workers that 

 no system of classification would henceforth be considered as a 

 serious contribution to science, which was not constructed on 

 phylogenetic lines. It meant the final overthrow of such ideas 

 as Agassiz held, that the divisions of the animal kingdom were 

 instituted by the Divine Intelligence as categories of his mode of 

 thought-K>f such fantastic systems as those, of Rafinesque and 

 Swainson and such strictly artificial ones as the arbitrary ar- 



