39 
that the puzzle still underlying all our evolutionary enquiries is the 
“ origin of species.” We know that species may be, and often are, 
indeterminate quantities, and incapable of exact definition, but this 
only intensifies the necessity for having the mo3t intelligent men to 
define, as near as may be, the species and the various forms that the 
species assume, for it is only by an exact knowledge of species and 
their various forms that we can ever hope to obtain even an approxi¬ 
mate knowledge of the origin of species. Every educated man and 
woman knows that we do not look upon entomology as an exact science. 
We cannot go to our living insects and ask for a straightforward 
answer—yea or nay—to our questions, as the chemist can go to his 
test-tube. It becomes, therefore, the more necessary, owing to this 
inexactness, this uncertainty, that our facts should be defined in the 
best manner possible. 
Whilst, however, I disagree with those who are inclined to scoff at 
the value of the exact and correct determination of species, I recognise 
that there is a substratum of method in the peculiar form of 
criticism that such scoffers adopt. It is obvious that for physiological 
study, and for histological or anatomical details, the question of species 
is not of great importance, and, therefore, to those to whom the 
specimens have nothing but physiological importance, the exact 
description and correct knowledge of species may be more or less 
unnecessary, but to the true philosophical student, who wishes for 
exactitude in the data from which he draws his deductions, the matter 
presents quite another phase. Species appear to him to represent, so 
to speak, the ultimate result of whole ages of evolutionary effort, and, 
if this be granted, what possibility of correct reasoning is there for 
those who take up the intricate lines of the study of the evolution of 
any special species, or even of any special structure or organ, if he 
does not know the species whose origin, or the origin of some 
particular structure of which he is trying to explain. The species- 
describer, if he does his work intelligently and carefully, is giving the 
evolutionist the exact material on which alone any stable conclusions 
can be drawn with precision, and, if his work is thus valuable, we 
must still recognise, nay, welcome those, who give their best powers to 
the unravelling of the species in their multitudinous forms, since these 
form the basis of all advanced evolutionary study. 
SPECULATION IN ENTOMOLOGY. 
Whilst acknowledging, then, the value of species description, we 
would urge the other side of the question with equal force. We would 
ask the conservative entomologist, who still believes that all ento¬ 
mological science begins and ends with the description of species, as 
well as the un-understandable individual who simply collects, year 
after year, the species that others have already described, and account 
it science, to remove the incubus of their weight against any intelligent 
speculation in natural history subjects. All evolutionary work must 
be at first more or less speculative, because it is all more or less of a 
general character, wide in its operation, although based on considerable 
detail. The great point of objection, brought forward by those who 
would shut out all theory in entomological work, is the incompleteness of 
the facts at our disposal. Many of those who are not inclined to object 
to speculation per se, yet insist that speculation in biological matters 
