NOTES ON CHAETOTAXY 
155 
ties, one humeral; about five mesopleural, two sternopleural, 
the posterior very long ; a tuft of hypopleural bristles.” 
I need not enter here into details of the success of this new 
method of description, of which an anonymous contemporary 
said ( [Untom. JSTachr., 1883, p. 219) : “ It deserves the greatest 
publicity, because it opens entirely new prospects for the determi¬ 
nation of Diptera, and will probably be soon universally adopted.” 
That, with sufficient material, it is possible to give a chaetotactic 
description of even very small Diptera, I have shown in a later 
paper, “ On the Chaetotaxy of Cacoxenus indagator Lw.” (125, 
1891). 
It might have been expected that my papers on Chaetotaxy 
would have been most welcome to Professor Brauer, when he 
began, soon afterwards, to work at his “ Muscaria Schizometopa,” 
the first instalment of which appeared in 1889. But, exasperated 
as he was against me on account of my criticism of his paper 
on Notacantha (89, 1882), he purposely abstained (of course, to 
his own detriment) from using chaetotactic characters. In his 
Preface he said: “ Who once begins to subdivide the genera 
Tachina and Dexia , will be compelled to subdivide so far, that, for 
the definition of species he will be reduced to use characters of 
the lowest degree, as, for instance, the nmcrochaetae, etc.” 1 In 
the same Preface, when speaking of macrochaetae, he sedulously 
avoided even the use of my name in connection with them, and 
mentioned only Rondani, Macquart, Loew, and Schiner. In his 
choleric outburst against my new distribution of Diptera which I 
published later (128, 1891), he denounced Chaetotaxy in the most 
unmeasured terms. This obstinacy could not last forever. 
Brauer soon became aware that he could not go on without using 
chaetotactic characters, especially those based on the position of 
thoracic macrochaetae. Protests and reclamations arose from 
different sides, and compelled him to relent. In his “ Muscaria 
Schizometopa,” Vol. IV, p. 3, at bottom (1895), he quoted a passage 
of my Chaetotaxy (Trans. Ent. Soc., London, 1884, p. 513), in which 
1 “ Wer anfangt die Gattung Tachina oder Dexia -zu zerlegen, der ist gezwungen, 
so lange zu schalten, bis fiir die Arten nur ganz untergeordnete Cliaractere ubrig 
bleiben, z. B. die Macrocliaetenstellung.” 
