1863.] 
221 
whenever practicable, from numerous specimens, and carefully noting 
all the variations ; for to describe the species is often a very different 
thing from describing the individual. Hence, too, we may see the 
reason why descriptions are necessary even when the very best colored 
figures are given; for a single figure necessarily gives only the indi¬ 
vidual, perhaps an average of the species, perhaps an extreme variety, 
but a good description gives the variations as well, and consequently 
the species. In variable genera, such for instance as the coleopterous 
Haltica, Ghr^somela, CryptocepTialus^ and their allies, almost any ento¬ 
mologist not familiar with the Order, would suppose individual speci¬ 
mens taken from the two extremes of a specific series to be specifically 
distinct, and it is only the existence of the intermediate grades which 
proves them to be identical. In one word, the amount of difference 
between two supposed species is comparatively nothing, the constancy 
of the difference is comparatively everything. 
I am not ignorant of the existence in the Vegetable Kingdom of 
what are called Dimorphous species, where hermaphrodite flowers of 
two distinct types of structure, without any intermediate grades, occur 
on separate plants of what is undoubtedly the same species. (See 
SilUman^s Journal xxxvi. p. 279.) Something similar to this has 
been long known in the Animal Kingdom, in the case of the females 
and so-called neuters of social insects. The queen-bee actually differs 
from the common working-bee in several important structural charac¬ 
ters ; and hymenopterists do not hesitate to separate, as specifically or 
even generically distinct, forms which differ in no greater degree than 
do these two forms, which undoubtedly belong to the same sex of the 
same species. It may be said that the differences between the queen- 
bee and the working-bee arise from differences in food, &c., or what natu¬ 
ralists call “ the Conditions of Life.” G-ranted. But who will undertake 
to assert without a particle of proof that if the food, &c. were of an inter¬ 
mediate character, an intermediate form between the queen and the 
working-bee would be produced ? It would be as reasonable for some 
chemical dogmatist to assert without a particle of proof, that because 
certain chemical substances are known to exist in what are called 
“ alio tropic states,” therefore the intermediate states can be called into 
being. Again, what is known as “ gynandromorphism” in the Coleop¬ 
terous Dytlscus and in Lepidoptera in Papilio Turnus and in certain 
