ABSTRACT
An entomologist has recently been sent to prison for stealing beetles from the British Museum. This is the type specimen, on which the person who first described the species based his description, and it generally exists in some museum or other. Taxonomy, that is to say the assignment of animals to species and of species to genera, families, and so on, is only a part of zoology, but it is an important part. Charles Darwin called his greatest book The Origin of Species, and he knew what he was talking about, because he had spent eight years in classifying living and fossil barnacles. The novelist Lytton Bulwer satirized Darwin for his interest in barnacles. The Government has great schemes for growing groundnuts and sunflowers in tropical Africa. Taxonomy is of great practical and theoretical importance, and the beetles in the British Museum are a really valuable national property.
