86 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



modern sub-families or with genera. They are of less value than the 

 one and either greater or less than the other. So the coitus are also both 

 greater and less than genera ; often they are plainly nothing but groups 

 or sub-genera, but as often they embrace a heterogenous collection to 

 which no appellation can be given. They are constructed in defiance 

 of any generic principle, whether it be community of descent or 

 structural resemblance. They are precisely what the name coitus indicates, 

 an assemblage, a batch, a lot of things brought together, and in this case the 

 tie is not relationship, but a superficial resemblance in which relationship 

 has no part, and by which all natural grouping is violated, and members 

 of distinct genera, of distinct sub-families and families are brought together 

 because they happen to be red or yellow or blue. Hiibner struck out 

 a new path for himself, and instead of adopting the systems sanctioned 

 by the usage of his day, or the characters on which such systems were 

 based, he fixed upon the single item of coloration as the unit of his 

 arrangement. This runs from coitus to Stirps and vitiates the whole. As 

 I have said eisewhere, it is exactly as a child would sort his alleys and taws, 

 or as if, according to the illustration of Dr. Boisduval, applied to this very 

 book,a botanist should found his classification upon the colors of the flowers, 

 or the marbling or pinking of the leaves. Or it is as if a zoologist were 

 to sort the mammals by coloration, and put in one genus a black cat, 

 black fox, black wolf, black bear, in another a gray cat, gray fox, gray 

 wolf and a badger; or as if an ornithologist would couple a blue jay and a 

 blue crane, a gold finch and a yellow parrot. It is impossible, therefore, that 

 these coitus can be ranged with genera. They are something essen- 

 tially different, crude creations of an unscientific mind,' 1 ' and any attempt 

 to utilize them is like forcing curved lines to lie parallel with straight. 



* What good result was possible when such an author attempted to 

 classify all the species of the several divisions of the great order Lepidoptera, never 

 having seen more than a small fraction of the insects themselves and knowing 

 nothing of the remainder except through loose descriptions and from plates like those 

 of Herbst and Esper and Cramer, in which the superficies only is represented and that 

 coarsely and with no heed to exactness. Many of the figures on these plates cannot 

 even now be identiiied, and are believed to represent insects which have no exist- 

 ence in nature, perhaps manufactured articles sold to confiding collectors by cunning 

 dealers. Treitschke intimates that the dealers palmed on the author of the Ver- 

 zeichnis3 varieties for species, and common exotics as rare indigenous. Hubnet's 

 contemporaries understood his capabilities and were fully equal to judging correctly 

 his system, and accordingly the Verzeichniss was quietly ignored, and except through 

 his plates, this author exercised no influence on that generation. 



