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But this is not my business: I merely call the attention of the classifiers to this field of study and pass on. About the end of May, the coloring of the nymph, hitherto a light red, alters greatly and forecasts the coming transformation. The head, the thorax and the scarf formed by the wings become a handsome, shiny black.
There are two or three species, but all with very similar habits, though, as usual, the French classifiers have separated them into distinct genera."
Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition, if superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable impress in the immemorial rock.
Yet, whether it be that these things will not be intellectually learned, or, that many centuries must elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a soul, there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of things.
If we are to attain to a complete knowledge of the Earth, and if we are to describe what we learn about it in an adequate manner so that others may participate in our knowledge, then we must use our hearts as well as our heads. We must be artists as well as meticulous classifiers, cataloguers, and reasoners.
Certainly, when the genus Anthidium was set down by the classifiers, they were not wanting in scientific precision: they consulted, under the lens of the microscope, the wings, the mandibles, the legs, the harvesting-brush, in short, all the details calculated to assist the proper delimitation of the group.
At first I spoke of two, then of three; so that even in my addition I was modestly below the mark, and had really some grounds for recommending our friends the classifiers to beware what they asserted in this case.
And yet with the exception of that dry husk of knowledge, concerning size, form and colouration, which classifiers and cataloguers obtain from specimens, very little indeed scarcely anything, in fact is known about the Tree-creepers; and it would not be too much to say that there are many comparatively obscure and uninteresting species in Europe, any one of which has a larger literature than the entire Tree-creeper family.
Born and brought up amid what our society classifiers, with their sure democratic instincts, loved to call the "aristocratic" circle in New York, his three years in the Assembly at Albany introduced him to the motley group of Representatives of high and low, bank presidents and farmers, blacklegs and philanthropists, who gathered there to make the laws for New York State.
That each of the groups defined by the classifiers had such status as this was the stock doctrine of zoology, as also that the individual species making up the groups, and hence the groups themselves, maintained their individual identity absolutely unaltered from the moment of their creation, throughout all successive generations, to the end of their racial existence.
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