56 
HALIDAY AND LOEW 
tion to Haliday iti 1847, I doubt if the latter would have been satis¬ 
fied with it! 
In the next letter to Loew (December 11, 1847, of which I have 
already given an extract above), Haliday took up the subject of 
Orphnephila again, and said: “ I have (I doubt not) succeeded, 
in what I had long sought in vain, to find the larva of Thaumalea , 
though, just about to leave home on a journey, I had to leave it to 
the care of a non-entomological friend, and fear it will not be 
reared. It is half-aquatic, with anterior and posterior spira¬ 
cles only, and though furnished with very singular, numerous, gill¬ 
like appendages in a double row down the back, seems to be not 
very distant from the larvae of Ceratopogon ,” etc. 1 This mention of 
the larva of Orphnephila has never been published, and Haliday him¬ 
self does not refer to it, either in Walker’s “Ins. Brit. Dipt.,” Vol. 
Ill (1856), or in his “ On Some Remaining Blanks,” etc. (1857). 
There is no doubt that, later, he recognized in it the larva of the 
Psychodid Ulomyia, the description of which, as given in Walker, 
loc. cit ,, Vol. II, p. 254, agrees with the statement made in Haliday’s 
letter. 
That Haliday, in the above-quoted passage of his letter, calls 
the fly Thaumalea (and not Orphnephila ) is again a fine trait of 
his character. When he published his first paper on Orjihnephila , 
he was not aware of the contemporaneous publication of Ruthe. 
As soon as he knew of it he acknowedged (in the same letter of 
December 11) its right of priority, because the number of the vol¬ 
ume of the Zoological Journal containing Haliday’s paper, although 
dated 1831, was not actually published until 1833, “the expenses 
of the Journal being greater than the returns, or from some other 
causes.” Later, however, it was proved that the name Thaumalea 
was preoccupied, and Haliday’s name was therefore retained. 
The behavior of Haliday in the matter of Orphnephila affords 
an epitome of his whole scientific career: an intense craving for 
completeness and perfection, quite disinterested, because shy of 
1 This comparison with Ceratopogon is not appropriate, because the larvae of the 
latter genus are polymorphous, and were very little known at that time. Haliday, as 
appears in a footnote in the same letter, refers to the Ceratopogon larvae with spatu- 
late appendages on the back, which have been described by Dufour (1845) and by 
Perris (184G). 
