168 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Grote wishes to keep tied to it. Not only so, but if the tendencies which 

 produced this form continued, the form Nitela might become extinct, and 

 yet Nebris would only be var. Nebris of the extinct Nitela. 



Surely we must classify species as we find them existing at present, 

 and not on the basis of any man's conjecture of what they may have been 

 hundreds of thousands of years ago. If the law of priority is to be 

 carried back to primeval times, it will be invested with new terrors. 



In regard to my remarks on Lophodonta Angulosa and Lophodonta 

 Georgica, or, as Dr. Packard in his work on the Bombycine Moths gives 

 them, Lophodonta Angulosa and Drymonia Georgica, I confess that I 

 had overlooked the paper by Messrs. Grote and Robinson in the Annals 

 of the N. Y. Lyceum N. Hist. 



Of course, theoretically, anyone who ventures to write on any 

 entomological subject is supposed to be acquainted with everything which 

 has ever been published on that subject in his own country, and in every 

 other country, but practically if we attempted to follow that rule, I am 

 afraid that little, if anything, would be written. We have to take some 

 chances, and a man away from large entomological libraries must depend 

 to a certain extent upon catalogues and indexes, and in no record or 

 catalogue which I possess is this paper referred to. 



I am much obliged to Mr. Grote for calling my attention to it, and 

 may point out that the authors fell into the error of giving the number of 

 Abbot & Smith's plate as 78 instead of 83, as given by me. 



I disagree with those gentlemen, however, in their conclusions, as 

 there is not a particle of evidence pointing to the probability of the 

 " lowe r right-hand figure " of Abbot's plate being a male. It was figured 

 as a female, and presumably belonged to that sex. It is, of course, 

 possible that Abbot may have been mistaken, and it may have been a 

 male, just as he figured a small female of P/tobetron Pithecium as the 

 male of that species, a not very heinous error when the extremely 

 aberrant character of the male is considered, but even if it was a male, I 

 fail to see that that would make any difference. The upper left-hand 

 figure was the one described as the typical form, it being distinctly stated 

 that the males and the majority of the females were of that type, while 

 the lower right-hand figure was given merely as a variety of colour. 



Mr. Grote says that Abbot & Smith's name became restricted to this 

 supposed " variety of colour " by Herrick - Schaffer's description of 

 Georgica, but he did not describe it ; he merely published a figure, a 



