56 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



I hardly think December in Buffalo has ever been known to produce 

 moths, yet I have to record the capture, on the 21st of December last, of 

 a specimen of Orgyia leucostigma, by Miss Mary Walker, probably the 

 contents of a late fall chrysalid, urged to escape by the unusual warm 

 weather of the season. 



ON GENERA AND THE LAW OF PRIORITY. 



BY A. R. GROTE, 



Director of the Museum, Buffalo Society Natural Sciences. 



The writers who are engaged in the work of giving us an account of 

 the different kinds of Butterflies and Moths inhabiting North America, 

 seem to fall into two categories with respect to their ideas of classification. 

 As in other departments of Natural Science, the Entomologists differ 

 principally in their conception of what constitutes a genus. They are 

 either lumpers, making their genera very wide, or splitters, making their 

 genera restricted and dependent upon less conspicuous details of structure. 

 And the different writers display as many phases of the two ideas, so 

 that, with respect to any one individual, we may not certainly classify him 

 without attention. Feeble lumpers may be recognized by their admittance 

 of a few more obvious genera even when these have been proposed by 

 representative splitters. Feeble splitters may be known by their admission 

 of sub-genera, or sub-generic divisions. Again, the lumpers may be 

 divided into intelligent lumpers, who, for the most part, may be aware of 

 the minutest differences in structure offered by the objects of their studies, 

 but who fail to consider these differences as worthy of expression in 

 generic nomenclature ; and unintelligent lumpers, who fail in perception 

 and in knowledge alike. Numerically speaking, the lumpers are 

 in the ascendant, perhaps in the proportion that it is easier to 

 appreciate general resemblances rather than minute agreements. As the 

 rule, it is the lumpers who attack, but, strange to say, it is not so much 

 the method of the splitters that they attack by a display of argument 

 drawn from fact, but the application of zoological rules of nomenclature 

 and the operation of the law of priority in scientific writing. As a rule, 



