TWO PRINCIPAL WORKS OF ROBINEAU-DESVOIDY 
185 
“ In general, the whole systematic arrangement of the work seems to us 
to suffer from a too great multiplicity of subdivisions of the first, of the 
second, and even of the third order. The number of genera, for instance, 
is too great, so that, on the average, each of them hardly contains three 
species. We can conceive that Mr. Rob.-Desvoidy required such a scaf¬ 
folding for disposing of so many and of so closely connected species, but 
he might, at least, have omitted a part of them. 
“ The family, the tribal, and even the generic names are well formed, 
short, and euphonic. A few of them only must be rejected on the ground 
of preoccupation in other families. Much less satisfactory are the names 
derived from men more or less celebrated in natural sciences, and especially 
in entomology, because they are not always brief and easy to pronounce. 
At the same time, they may sometimes cause the slight inconvenience of 
connecting the name of a distinguished man with some disagreeable 
epithet. 
“Your Commissioners, nevertheless, do not consider the w T ork of Mr. 
Rob.-Desvoidy, in the shape in which it was brought before them, as 
finished : — 
“ 1st. Because he does not seem to have sufficiently limited his subject 
by distinctly defining it, and that he could only do by giving a preliminary 
survey (‘tableau’) of all the Diptera. 
“2d. Because he has not prefixed to his work a somewhat detailed ter¬ 
minology, which requirement is of an absolute (‘ rigoureuse ’) necessity, 
although difficult to accomplish. He would, in such a case, have to take 
into account the two pairs of inferior palpi which he admits in the genera 
Phorophylla and Phyto. Indeed, he would have perceived that all the 
Diptera have these same organs, only less distinct, and that they con¬ 
stitute the lips (‘ levres ’) of the proboscis, the larger size of these four 
palpi being probably due to the prolonged extremities of each lip. lie 
would have likewise seen that the study of the wing-veins, which he has 
neglected, and which have been used by Meigen to great advantage, might 
have tended to confirm several of his principal divisions. He would perhaps 
have been also led to use characters borrowed from the proboscis, which, 
when well analyzed, seem to afford good tests of affinity, although of a 
difficult application (‘ d’un difficile emploi ’). 
“ 3d. Because he has not established a synonymy with recent authors who 
have been specially occupied with the same subject, such as Fallen, and, 
above all, Meigen ; a gap difficult to fill, no doubt, a matter perhaps appar¬ 
ently of little importance, but which we strongly invite him to attend to, in 
the first place in a spirit of justice, and next in order not to embarrass 
science again by new names imposed upon the same species and the 
same subdivisions. Considering that Meigen, in taking in the work of 
