( Ixvii ) 
cripples the imaginative faculty.* The methods of attacking 
the problems connected with living organisms have been 
mcreased and improved from every side, and the ana- 
tomist and physiologist, the morphologist, the embryologist, 
the student of bionomics, have all an equal claim to 
contribute to biological theory. The particular problems 
relating to the transformation of species are no doubt 
best dealt with by those who, by systematic work, have 
acquired a true notion of what is meant by the term 
species." But so far as entomology is concerned, it 
must be confessed that the greater part of our system.atic 
work has emanated from cabinet entomologists, who know 
nothing of the species they describe as living organisms by 
direct observation, and to me it appears doubtful whether 
this kind of work does confer any special faculty of specu- 
lating with advantage on the species question. It seems 
rather that the field-naturahst " in the old sense of the 
term has the advantage, and I may remind you in this 
connection that during the voyage of the Bear/le, when 
Darwin began to make those observations on island life - 
which afterwards led him to take up .the question of species 
transformation, he was essentially a " field-naturalist," his 
systematic work on the Cirripedia not having been com- 
menced till after his return. So also Wallace, afc the time 
when he independently elaborated the theory of natural 
selection, was certainly not a systematist in this narrow 
sense. He has been good enough to favour me with his 
views on this point, in a letter dated Dec. 31st, 1895, in 
which he says: " I do not think species- describing is of 
any special use to the philosophical generaliser, but I do 
think the collecting, naming, and classifying some extensive 
group of organisms is of great use, is, in fact, almost 
essential to any thorough grasp of the whole subject of 
the evolution of species through variation and natural 
selection. I had described nothing when I wrote my papers 
on variation, etc. (except a few fishes and palms from the 
* See a letter from Darwin to Bates in 1861, Life and Letters, Vol. II., 
p. 379. 
