Abstract
(Continued from page 94)
PRESERVED specimens have the great advantage over living ones, that they can be collected in infinitely greater numbers, maintained in juxtaposition, and compared, however distant the times and places at which they had been found. They are often the only materials from which we can obtain a knowledge of the races they represent; although still consisting of individuals only, they can, by their numbers, give better ideas of species and other abstract groups than the almost isolated living ones; and their careful preservation supplies the means of verifying or correcting descriptions or delineations which have excited suspicion. Their great drawback is their incompleteness, and the impossibility of deriving from them all the data required for the knowledge of a race or even of an individual. It is owing to the frequency with which characters supplied by preserved specimens, although of the most limited and unimportant a nature, have been treated as sufficient to establish affinities and other general conclusions which have proved fallacious, that the outcry I have alluded to has been raised against museums and herbaria by those very theorists whose speculations would fall to the ground if all the data supplied by preserved specimens were removed from their foundation.
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Mr. Bentram's Anniversary Address to the Linnean Society . Nature 4, 110–114 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004110a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004110a0