116 PROCEEDINGS ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



ers, and systematics supplies the means of identification of the 

 objects upon which the observations have been made. Both are 

 merely helps towards our understanding of the living forms, but 

 most systematists seem to forget this and work as though the 

 ultimate acceptance of their ideas would depend only on 

 their particular, preserved specimens. A species, in the writer's 

 opinion, is composed of a vast number of living ^ individuals re- 

 producing their kind from generation to generation, usually dis- 

 tributed over a rather large area and tending to differ more or less 

 in the extremes of its range, according to environmental differ- 

 ences and to the migratory habits of its individuals before ovi- 

 position. An infinitesimally small sample of a species is pre- 

 served in all the collections in the world, and under existing 

 conditions, no systematist can study very much of this sample. 



It is probable that the confusion of forms mentioned below 

 under Metriona bicolor is the direct result of the early descrip- 

 tion as distinct species of insufficient samples from widely sepa- 

 rated local races, which not only blend in intermediate localities 

 but attain greater divergence in localities then unknown. The 

 only solution of such cases may be through such field studies and 

 breeding projects as have been undertaken by Tower on Lepti no- 

 tar sa. 



Until material many times greater than that now available 

 is at hand and is accompanied by biological data and specimens 

 of immature stages, the writer thinks it unwise to argue about the 

 specific, subspecific, varietal or aberrational status of the forms 

 in such composite species as Chelymorpha cassidea, Physonota 

 unipunctata, Jonthonota nigripes or Metriona bicolor. According 

 to the standards of many workers he would probably be justified 

 in proposing a dozen or two new names for forms that differ 

 more or less in habitus, and further data on them might or might 

 not justify this course but he prefers to await justification of 

 such procedure than to anticipate it. The temptation to as- 

 sume that our material comes from isolated colonies which there- 

 fore represent "species," "subspecies," "incipient species" "va- 

 rieties" or whatever we are in the habit of calling them, is very 

 great, and it may seem a duty to propose new names for them if 

 possible. But when some other student of the group, wlu.x 1 

 locality records would fall in regions intermediate to the spots 

 on our map, tries to apply such subdivision to his material, he 

 is apt to experience serious trouble in deciding the affinities of 

 his forms. The writer believes that most species are composites 

 of separable units but that the piecemeal segregation of some of 

 these units as "species" of the same rank as the original composite, 

 complicates rather than simplifies future work. Usable subdi- 

 vision of a recognized compound unit can only be done from a 



