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THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 245 



Mr. Doran was rather interested in the idea of ear/j collecting. In 

 Tennessee he collected all the year round, and each season furnished 

 something characteristic. 



Mr. Fletcher asked whether the lights do not lose their attraction to 

 insects after a time, and stated that such had been his experience at 

 Ottawa where the insects had become largely accustomed to the light and 

 were not nearly so much attracted as at first. 



Mr. Hudson had found this so in Plattsburgh. Insects were very 

 much less abundant now than when the lights were first started. 



Mr. Schwarz had found that certain lights exercised a superior attraction 

 year after year, and that they were now as good as they ever had been. 

 He could never understand the reason why a certain light should be so 

 attractive as compared with others immediately surrounding it, and 

 apparently as favourably located. He did not think the fauna was much 

 influenced by the specimens killed at lights. He was surprised to find, 

 last June, that Salt Lake City, Utah, seemed to have no electric light 

 fauna ; but this might be seasonal. 



Mr. Smith thought it was certainly seasonal, for the late Mr. Henry 

 Edwards had made quite an interesting collection of Lepidoptera at that 

 point, almost all of them at the lights. 



Mr. Smith, using the proof sheets of his new list as a text, made some 



REMARKS ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE LEPIDOPTERA. 



An order that is so general a favourite with collectors might be assumed 

 to be well studied and well systematized. And yet that is exactly what 

 the Lepidoptera are not. Characters for use are abundant, and excellent 

 work has been done in certain groups ; yet save Herrick-Schaeffer, no one 

 has ever proposed a consistent classification of the entire order. In 

 America such a work has been impossible from a lack of material, and the 

 Herrick-Schasffer classification has proved too one-sided with the accumu- 

 lation of new material. The order has also suffered from the large 

 number of amateurs and superficial workers who describe an insect as 

 belonging to a certain family or genus because it looks so, but who have 

 not the remotest idea of the characters that really determine classification. 

 The result when it is undertaken to arrange our species systematically, is 

 startling, and the student soon learns that he cannot rely upon either 

 generic or family references. There has been no system in the use of 



