y!

Presently he wanted to classify; and he wanted to do it alone and
unaided--it looked easy enough. It irked him, pricked his pride, to
have to be always asking somebody else "what is this?" And right then
and there those inevitable difficulties that confront every earnest
and conscientious seeker at the beginning of his quest, arose, as the
fascinating living puzzles presented themselves for his solving.

To classify correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he
never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half
a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them
in their proper places.

Mr. Flint tried it--and those wretched creatures _wouldn't_ stay put.
It seemed to him that every time he looked at them they ought to be
somewhere else; always there was something--a bar, a stripe, a small
distinctive spot, a wing of peculiar shape, antennae, or palpi, or
spur, to differentiate them.

"Where the Sam Hill," he blazed, "do all these footy little devils
come from, anyhow? Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next
one that's exactly like it is entirely different the next time you
look at it? There's too much beginning and no end at all to this
game!"

For all that, he followed them up. I saw with pure joy that he refused
to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs. He
had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled. First he turned
the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible
angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his
shoulders and hurled himself into work.

There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillae, that splendid Gulf
Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South. She's a
long-wing, but she's not a Heliconian; she's a silver-spot, but she's
not an Argynnis. She bears a striking family likeness to her fine
relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which
differentiate her. Whose word should he take for this, and why?
Wherein lay those differences? He began, patiently, with her
cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the
purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a
dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from
this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and
her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock
flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver