72 
Museum apprentice rarely ever becomes a skilled workman, for his 
whole time is taken up in examining the dried bodies of insects, so that 
he has none to spare for the study of living insects. He may learn to 
name specimens; but when the naming is done, the real difficulties 
begin, for then the insects have to be classified, and how can this be 
done by a man with only a Museum training. The general characters 
of the imago have been all that such have ever had to go upon, and 
these alone, therefore, can by them be considered in deciding where 
any given species should be placed. Now such a method is at best but 
a poor makeshift, and must lead to a vast amount of error ; and when 
the later philosophy began to gain ground, and it was shown that the 
general resemblance of many insects was due to outside forces and had 
no real meaning in so far as structural relationship was concerned— 
that colour as a character was unreliable because two specimens of the 
same insect might be, the one white, the other black ; that the antennas 
were untrustworthy because the}^ varied in the sexes; that the marking 
varied endlessly in different individuals of the same species; that even 
the differences in leg structure, tufts of hairs, etc. were often but 
secondary sexual characters, in fact, that the real relationship between 
species was often obscured by dozens of matters of but little import in 
classification—then it became clear that a system of classification based on 
imaginal characters alone was necessarily a hotch-potch and not worth y 
of the name of science. 
Our inability to prove some of the theories which have almost passed 
into axioms of belief, removes entomology from among the number of 
the exact sciences. We assume a special centre of creation for each 
species, and cannot conceive any other reasonable explanation; but yet, 
the fact, that such a fundamental point has not been proved, is fatal to 
the exactitude of the science we profess. Similar cases will occur to 
mimw of you. But if, in its philosophical aspect, entomology may not 
be considered an exact science, nevertheless, its philosophical bases are 
as sound as those of any other branch of biology, and in connection 
with the soundness of the biological facts, I will say my last word on 
classification. 
The object of classification is, to place together those species which 
have most recently developed from the same stem, working back as far 
as may be through the most recent stems to those less recent, and so 
back to that from whence all have arisen. 
At present we see but darkly. We ourselves hardly know what we 
want. We are like blind men groping for the light. We do not really 
know what are the essential characters in our insects which will enable 
us to trace back their origin, and hence we move in mist, and onty 
emerge now and again from our confusion. But the physiologist and 
embryologist have come to our aid, and we find that certain broad 
axioms hold good through the various stages of development of all living 
things. Biological students have formulated certain generalisations, 
based on broad and comprehensive data, and these generalisations apply 
to all branches of animal life. The biologists tell us that the only system 
of classification which can be natural, must be based on those stages in 
which we may read the past history of the insects, so that the system of 
classification becomes, when thoroughly worked out, as it were a genea¬ 
logical tree of the insects. The linear arrangement, they say, is evidently 
unsound to the most cursory observer. The embryological conditions, 
