Vol. XXviii] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 467 



dence turns up. Plenty of copies exist in the original state of 

 issue. They are all in a single blue paper wrapper without any 

 printing on it, none in several wrappers.* Stephens in his 

 "111. Brit. Ent. Haust.," Vol. iv, p. 386 (1835) has a note on 

 the "Verzeichniss" and gives an abstract of it and says that he 

 had not been able to obtain it before ; after this he quotes it 

 systematically. 



American authors, in the Lepidoptera at all events, and, I be- 

 lieve, universally, are to be congratulated on not having adopted 

 the insidious German specific polynomial nomenclature, by 

 which the specific name is broken up even unto the sixth degree 

 (vide R. Verity's "Rhopalocera Palaearctica"), to which we 

 in Britain have to a considerable extent succumbed of late years. 

 There is no necessity whatever to give names to local, seasonal, 

 sexual, polymorphic, hybrid, etc., forms, though in dealing 

 with a species its local and other varieties should of course be 

 described. There is no such thing in nature as a subspecies, if 

 a form is not connected by intergrades with its nearest ally in 

 another locality and does not interbreed with it, then it is a 

 species ; if this is not the case then it is a variety, geographical 

 or otherwise, and the term "subspecies" is merely a confession 

 of ignorance as to whether a form is a species or variety. The 

 naming of minor varieties is rapidly reducing the whole subject 

 to an unworkable farce and it is to be hoped that one of the 

 minor benefits of the present war will be that we in Britain 

 will return to a simple binomial nomenclature and purge our- 

 selves from this form of "Kultur." 



* Extract from letter dated November 12, 1894, from Sir M. Holz- 

 mann, librarian at Maryborough House, to H. M., the late King Ed- 

 ward VII, to the Lord Walsingham in reply to enquiries as to the dates 

 of Hiibner's works, as to the results of his enquiries at the Berlin Roy- 

 al Library. 



"As nothing is said about the works being in their original wrap- 

 pers, I conclude this is not the case. I confess that from the begin- 

 ning I had my doubts on this point, as I know that in Germany books 

 appearing gradually in parts used very rarely to be published in wrap- 

 pers, hut if so the wrappers had no printing at all. Even up to so 

 late a time as 50 or 40 years ago the parts were issued just as they 

 came from the press, each sheet separate, not even stitched or prop- 

 erly folded, and frequently with the title page and date of publication 

 on the first sheet, although the last sheet might come out years after 

 the publication of the first. I, myself, have bought many books in 

 that condition when it is, of course, quite hopeless to attempt fixing 

 the actual date of issue of each part." 



