MARCH 4, 1921 rohwer: nomenclature of supergeneric names 107 



apparently overlooks the fact that in the most recent catalogue of 

 Hemiptera the author has been guided by the rule of priority in se- 

 lecting family names. In the Hymenoptera there has been no fixed 

 rule governing the selection of supergeneric names but by far the 

 greater number of taxonomists have formed the names from the oldest 

 included genus, and some of the most apparent exceptions which oc- 

 cur in recent catalogues are caused by the authors of these catalogues 

 accepting only part of classifications or by their placing different 

 values on certain supergeneric groups. 



In his arguments for what he calls the "permanent type genus" 

 rule, Dr. Oberholser advances the belief that for Hymenoptera Dalla 

 Torre has catalogued all the family and subfamily names, and with 

 this as a basis it would be comparatively simple to adopt this prin- 

 ciple. This is hardly true, and when one contemplates adopting 

 the law of priority for the selection of supergeneric names, he loses 

 much of his enthusiasm as soon as he sees the labor and difhculties 

 involved in cataloguing these names. Dalla Torre's "Catalogus 

 Hymenoptorum" gives only a few of these. vSupergeneric group 

 names have been used not only in taxonomic papers but also in local 

 and faunistic lists, catalogues of collections and in biological and ana- 

 tomical papers. There has never been any serious effort made to 

 index all these nam.es, in fact many of the papers containiag them 

 are of such a local or ephemeral nature that only the titles are recorded. 

 To adopt this principle would mean that we should hav^e to go com- 

 pletely through the vast literature dealing with Hymenoptera and 

 when this task was completed we should still be in doubt because of 

 the possibility of overlooking papers. Such work would require 

 considerable time and could only be done in large libraries. After 

 such researches were completed it would be necessary to publish the 

 results in full, so that in case other students should wish to subdivide 

 existing groups, they would be able to determine if a name had ever 

 been proposed for a similar group or a group containing some of the 

 same genera as those they included in their unit. Of course it may 

 be argued that it would not be necessary to catalogue all papers and 

 that we should only include those which are purely systematic, but 

 such a plan would be unsatisfactory because it would envolve a de- 

 cision as to what was "systematic" and might eliminate such useful 

 lists as those prepared for the various editions of the Insects of New 

 Jersey. 



From the above it might be understood that I do not favor the 

 adoption of the method approved by Dr. Oberholser; and this is in a 



