Parsons : Hints on Natueal History Collecting. 73 



we know to what species they refer. It is necessary, however, to 

 impress upon beginners the need for great care and caution in naming 

 their specimens. It is better to gire half a name, or none, rather than 

 a wrong one. Specimens are named by comparing them either with 

 the description in a handbook or with figures, or typical specimens. 

 Beginners often slur over the minuter and less accessible characters, 

 as for instance of the seed ; this is a mistake, for attention to these 

 costs less trouble than they imagined, and will often help to decide a 

 knotty point. 



If, instead of the grosser characters — the " morphology'' — we wish 

 to investigate the microscopic structure — ^the "histology" of an 

 organism, it is of course not necessary that our specimen should be an 

 entire one, but it is none the less important that it should be well 

 developed and well preserved, and that we should know the name. 



It may be that our object in collecting specimens is not so much to 

 study the characters of the kinds themselves as to ascertain the 

 conditions of time and place under which they occur. 



Although it is always desirable to secure good specimens if possible, 

 it is not essential to do so when our object is merely to prove the 

 occurrence of a species in a particular place ; a mere fragment, if recog- 

 nisable, will be sufficient for our purpose. A single leaf of the holly 

 in a herbarium, from an unknown district, would suffice to prove the 

 occurrence of that tree, and from a few battered fragments of 

 Sigillaria, Ammonites, and Belemnites, intrinsically valueless, the age 

 of whole mountain masses in the Alps has been determined. When 

 investigating the distribution of species, it is necessary to record not 

 merely the place and the date at which the specimen was obtained 

 (which should always be done in every collection), but also certain 

 other particulars, varying somewhat in the different sciences. For 

 instance : in geology it is of the first importance that the stratum from 

 which each fossil is obtained should be accurately recorded, both in 

 order to ascertain the range in time of that particular fossil, and also 

 on the other hand to determine the position, in the geological series, 

 of the rock in which it is found. For the want of systematic records 

 of this kind, the collections of beginners in geology are often a mere 

 mass of rubbish. One sees jumbled together in picturesque confusion, 

 in a drawer or box, coal-plants, liassic, oolitic, and cretaceous Ammo- 

 nites and Belemnites ; eocene and crag univalves ; silurian, devonian, 

 and carboniferous corals ; sea urchins from the oolite and chalk ; or 

 brachiopods and bivalves from various primary and secondary forma- 

 tions — all without names, geologic formation, or locality, and many 



