Abstract
REFERENCE has been made in NATURE to most of the series of remarkable entomological papers which Dr. R. J. Tillyard has communicated during the last few years to the Linnean Society of New South Wales, and which have been published in that society's Proceedings (vols. xli.-xliv.). These papers are worthy of the most careful attention of students of insects, because the author combines the power of intensive research into details of structure with a true instinct for those details that are of real importance in the elucidation of relationships, and with a broad morphological outlook on the group under consideration. He has the faith—which many of our younger naturalists, shut in to the study of the inheritance of varietal and specific characters, lack—that a knowledge of the phytogeny of large systematic groups is attainable, but he realises that such knowledge can come only through a careful comparison of recent adult and immature with extinct forms. Thus his evolutionary speculations are raised on surer foundations than those which contented many of his predecessors.
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C., G. The History of Metamorphic Insects. Nature 107, 249–250 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107249b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107249b0