June, '04] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 185 



general use by some term long since abandoned or lost sight 

 of, if a possible excuse can be found for it. Sometimes a 

 question arises whether a wrongly written or printed name 

 may be changed if it thereby becomes a synonym. 



It is literally a case of many men many minds, and to the 

 collector, without the basis for an opinion or a knowledge of 

 why things are done, all seems chaos, and he simply follows 

 whatever list he has or whatever authority has his confidence. 

 I quote from a recent number of the Ent. Record and Journal 

 on " Variation." 



' ' The average collector * * * * does not care a dead mite 

 for priority fancies. He asks for uniformity at any price, and 

 in the existing welter of opinions, will not bother his head 

 about who misspelled a name first and stuck to it, and who 

 dared to correct the printer's blunder, or started a system of 

 his own, necessitating a host of new divisions and subdivi- 

 sions, all intensely interesting to the scientist, but actually 

 repugnant to the field naturalist and the ' mere collector,' for 

 whom the rose smells as sweet whether it be called a rose or 

 redescribed as var. William-Allen-Richardsonii." 



While what I have said has been in comment on recent work 

 in L/epidoptera, it applies in principle to other orders also, and 

 there are some in which there are differences of opinion quite 

 as great. 



Now I admit to a little conservatism in some directions ; I 

 don't mind smashing things where I think they deserve it and, 

 of course, I admit everybody else to the same privilege ; but 

 it seems to me that there is a difference between an attempt to 

 correct a supposed error of observation or interpretation of 

 structure and an attempt to change names only. 



Classification is, after all, only a scaffolding upon which we 

 hang our knowledge, and names and divisions are mere pegs 

 to indicate the combination for which they stand. Every time 

 we change the combination indicated by the peg we disturb the 

 system. What injustice is done to Linne by using chi'rsis rather 

 than occllata as the type of Sphinx, and why should not La- 

 treille receive recognition for his limitation of the broad term, 

 and credit for the new term proposed by him ? 



