48 PROCEEDINGS ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



Heinemann, Lederer and Wocke followed Herrich-Schaffer's 

 lead, but without advancing beyond his recognition of the vena- 

 tion as an aid to classification, and they and other workers of 

 the period continued to be influenced by Zeller, who was the 

 object of a cult entirely out of proportion to his merits as a 

 systematist. 



Our American pioneers in the Microlepidoptera,Brackenridge- 

 Clemens, and in a less degree, Chambers, had a keen apprecia- 

 tion of the value of wing venation as a generic character and drew, 

 for example, far more advantage from Stainton's plates than did 

 Stainton himself. 



Walsingham began his career as a Microlepidopterist as a 

 disciple of Stainton and Zeller and his earlier work shows the 

 effect. In his later working years, he realized the fallacies of this 

 system and consigned many of his earlier genera to the synonomy, 

 continuing his work together with Durrant, on sounder lines. 



To Herrich-Schaffer and his followers the characters of the 

 venation were merely a means of classification. They found that 

 groups of species, which had been associated in genera on other 

 characters, agreed in venation and that this character was more 

 dependable than most of those which had hitherto been used. 

 There was, as yet, no science of phylogeny and no continuity in 

 the arrangement of the genera. 



It was not until Darwin's theory of evolution had been ad- 

 vanced, that the time was ripe for the realization of the full im- 

 portance of wing venation as indicative of phylogenetic relationship 

 and many years passed without the application of this principle. 

 It remained for Edward Meyrick first to apply Darwin's theo- 

 ries to the study of Microlepidoptera, and, with the aid of modern 

 morphological studies, to grasp the possibilities of the wing vena- 

 nation as a means of recognizing natural relationship and lines of 

 development. His ingenious rearrangement of the Microlepi- 

 doptera along natural evolutionary lines revolutionized the study 

 of this group and has resulted in a sound appreciation of their 

 mutual relationship and an undoubtedly nearly natural grouping 

 of these insects. 



Similar masterful studies of the lepidopterous wing venation 

 with similar good results were made independently in Germany 

 by Arnold Spuler and in America by Comstock. To them is 

 due, among other things, the important discovery of the funda- 

 mental significance of the clavus, or as it is better known in this 

 country by Comstock's somewhat later name, the jugum, a small 

 projection from the base of the fore-wing which serves to hold the 

 two wings together in the primitive groups of Lepidoptera, the 

 Micropterygidse and the Hepialidse. 



