CLASSIFICATION AND SYNONYMY. > 



the U. S. National Museum collection at Washington were kindly 

 loaned me from time to time by A. N. Caudell. The native and 

 introduced and established species are numbered consecutively 

 throughout the work, while those included but un-numbered rep- 

 resent adventive forms which have occasionally been taken within 

 our bounds but which are as yet not known to breed and live 

 throughout the year in any one locality. 



CLASSIFICATION. The classification followed in this work is 

 not that of any one previous author, and may therefore not meet 

 with the full approval of the up-to-date specialists in Orthoptera. 

 In the names which I have adopted for the higher groups, I have 

 not always followed "The Entomological Code" :i nor the rulings 

 of the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature. 

 There has been in recent years, too much of a tendency to split 

 hairs, to divide and subdivide the old well known groups into an 

 infinite number of minor ones which lead nowhere in particular 

 and only serve to confuse the beginner. The law of strict priority 3 

 and its resultant ruling of basing the name of a subfamily or 

 tribe upon the oldest generic name included are all right in the 

 main, but when they lead up to two such similar names as Acrid- 

 inae and Acrydiinae, confusion is sure to result, and priority 

 should give way to simplicity. In such cases the names adopted 

 by the more recent specialists are given in parenthesis and the 

 student can use them if he so desires. 



As with the higher groups so with the genera. I have not 

 always adopted the generic names which have been proposed in 

 recent years for certain of our species. A genus should be based 

 on certain definite and fixed structures and once so founded all 

 species then or thereafter assigned to that genus should possess 

 those structures. Strictly speaking, a genus does not exist in 

 nature but is only an artificial concept proposed by man to enable 

 him the more readily to group his species. As to what really 

 constitutes a set of generic characters there are about as many 

 individual opinions as there are proposed or adopted genera. My 

 reasons for rejecting or adopting certain questionable genera are 

 usually set forth and the student can use his own judgment as 

 to whether they are sound or not. 



2 Tfiis code, prepared at Washington in 1012 by those two eminent American ento- 

 mologists, Nathan Banks and A. N. Caudell, is, in the main, an excellent thing for be- 

 ginners but a number of its rulings have not been adopted by some of the leading en- 

 tomologists of the country. 



3 If strict priority in the naming of the higher groups be insisted upon, the name 

 Orthoptera itself, first used by Latreille in 1796 and later more definitely by Olivier in 

 1811, would have to give way to Dermaptcra, the name proposed for the group by DeGeer 

 in 1773, or to Ulonata, that proposed by Fabricius in 1775. 



