102 PROC. ENT. SOC. WASH., VOL. 23, NO. 5, MAY, 1921 



of Murray's and Murray's simply gives as derivation the 

 speculation he indicated in the first volume of his British 

 Aphides. It is entirely a product of his imagination. 



Aphis, then, as we find it, is a Greek word and upon the declen- 

 sion depends the spelling of our family name. As before 

 mentioned it appears to have been used nowhere in classical 

 Greek. If Linnaeus had found it there he could scarcely have 

 written aphides in the plural for the declension would be S0, 

 &4>eus. As a matter of fact the word is not Attic but belongs 

 to the Ionic dialect in which we have the genitive ->s for 

 i-stems. This is indicated by the presence of the word in a 

 Latin-Greek lexicon 1 dated 1554 in which I find the follow- 

 ing entry: 



Cimex, icis. f. g. o0is, wr 



In an earlier lexicon by Gulielmus Mainus (1523) I also find 

 the word aphis but no genitive is indicated. The word is here 

 written a^ts in one section and &<t>ia in another. In both of 

 these lexicons I find the Attic word /c6/ns as well. Of the many 

 examined, however, these two are the only ones in which the 

 word aphis appears. 



How did Linnaeus come to write aphides in the plural? 

 Several possibilities suggest themselves. It must be remem- 

 bered that until a very late period with the Greeks Ionic was 

 associated with medicine in much the same way as Latin has 

 been with our biological sciences. In the island of Cos, for 

 example, which was originally a Doric colony, Hippocrates and 

 his school employed a form of Ionic and it was for long years 

 afterwards the official medical dialect. The discussion of Cimex 

 would in all probability be associated with medicine. More- 

 over the evidence seems to indicate that in Asia Minor 

 words in like &<pi* were declined in the regular way with -los 

 in the genitive and not with -idos. 



Linnaeus may have known the word as Greek and concluded 

 without investigation that it should be a^uSos- This I think 

 probable. On the other hand he may have found that it was 

 actually used in the other Ionic form in some paper of which we 

 have no record. Had this been the case, however, one would 

 expect to find it in the lexicons. But it is possible that he simply 

 wrote it in its present Latin form without much consideration. 



The people of the East were well acquainted with many 

 insects and they used the products of some of them in their 

 industries. In view of the fact that the Attic people employed 

 a different word it seems possible that Aphis in some form or 



1 Dictionarum Latino-graecurn. In quo singulae dictiones ac locutiones 

 latinae, graecis vocibus ac sententiis praemissae, magnu utriusque linguae 

 comercium indicat. Huius ante plurima pars ex Budaei Vigiliaru reliquiis 

 exerpta est . . . Lutetiae, apud C Stephanum 1554. 



