Few men will be in a condition to comprehend and appreciate the paper,
but it will infallibly create for you a high and sound reputation. The
theory I quite assent to, and, you know, was conceived by me also, but I
profess that I could not have propounded it with so much force and
completeness.
Many details I could supply, in fact a great deal remains to be done to
illustrate and confirm the theory: a new method of investigating and
propounding zoology and botany inductively is necessitated, and new
libraries will have to be written; in part of this task I hope to be a
labourer for many happy and profitable years. What a noble subject would
be that of a monograph of a group of beings peculiar to one region but
offering different species in each province of it--tracing the laws
which connect together the modifications of forms and colour with the
_local_ circumstances of a province or station--tracing as far as
possible the actual _affiliation_ of the species.
Two of such groups occur to me at once, in entomology, in Heliconiidae
and Erotylidae of South America; the latter I think more interesting than
the former for one reason--the species are more local, having feebler
means of locomotion than the Heliconiidae.
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