Consequently, when we hear it said—as we may—that such and such an animal _must_ constitute a genus by itself, we may be assured that in nine cases out of ten the speaker is talking nonsense. It _may_ do so, but this is purely as a matter of convenience for purposes of classification. As examples of Flower’s broad and far-seeing way of looking at the limits of generic groups, we may take his inclusion of the foxes in the same group as the wolves, of the polecats and weasels with the martens, of the two-horned with the one-horned rhinoceroses, and of the blackbirds with the thrushes; and yet in all these instances, as in many others, a large number of his successors—many of whom cannot lay claim to anything approaching his intellectual capacity and his power of separating essentials from trivialities—cannot be content with the grand simplicity of his scheme of classification. What they gain by their involved systems and minute subdivisions is best known to themselves—to the public such complexity tends to render zoology, which ought to be one of the most attractive and delightful of all sciences (and it was one of Flower’s endeavours to make it as much so as possible), repulsive and distasteful. The present writer’s opportunities of intercourse with Professor Flower during his tenure of the Conservatorship of the Museum of the College of Surgeons were but few and intermittent, and restricted to the latter part of that time, he may therefore be pardoned for quoting from a biographer who appears to have enjoyed more favourable opportunities in this respect. Before doing so, however, the writer cannot refrain from putting it on record that his own appointment to the Geological Survey of India in the early seventies was largely due to the influence of Professor Flower, who had been his examiner in the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge, in December 1871. To revert to the subject of Flower’s personality in connection with his appointment in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, his biographer in the “Year-Book” of the Royal Society for 1901 writes as follows:—