116 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



And so I might go through the rest of the gentiles to the end of the 

 Hesperidae, and for all that matter, through the volume. But I think I 

 have shown the " utter want of agreement between Hiibner's groups and 

 modern genera." 



How incomplete and indefinite the characters given to the Stirps are 

 I have shown, and yet these are of all the definitions in the book the 

 ones especially requiring careful elaboration. There is nothing in them 

 that prevented Hiibner himself from assigning to one Stirps species which 

 are congeneric with species of another. I have given repeated instances 

 of this. The family has the same style of definition as the coitus, based 

 almost wholly on color, and consequently we see that the limits of 

 neither are at all heeded by the modern systematist. The family names 

 are to-day, in spite of laws and canons, ignored as unmanageable, but 

 the coitus are every whit as bad and can only be used by totally disre- 

 garding the characters assigned them by Hiibner. In fact these characters 

 in the hands of the systematist are as if they had never been written. 

 He makes up his own genera upon principles which Hiibner never dreamed 

 of, and takes what species he likes and leaves what he likes all over this 

 book. If he gave his new genus his own name as the maker of it, not an 

 objection could be made. It certainly is his and can go by the name 

 of another only by a fiction. But among the late genus makers — and 

 genus making has become a special craft — the usage has obtained to 

 select for the group of species to be distinguished, a name from some old 

 author, most especially one of Hiibner's coitus names, and whether or not 

 any species enumerated under the coitus be included in the new genus is 

 a matter of not the least moment, any more than whether the definition 

 of the coitus is applicable or not, and affix to it the name " Hub., 1816." 

 Now, why is that ? It certainly says as plainly as words can make it, 

 " Hubner created this genus and gave it this name, in 181 6," which is 

 false. But by saying it and sticking to it, the modern maker by his per- 

 tinacity gets a place for his spurious genus as by right of usage before 

 long, and his claim of priority is held by himself and the rest of the guild 

 to cut off all other authors from the fictitious date to the present day. 

 The scandalous injustice of this proceeding ought to be apparent to every 

 one concerned. And apart from the injustice, the immediate effect is to 

 unsettle the nomenclature and to hold it in that condition. Mr. Scudder 

 excuses himself for having introduced hundreds of names from Hubner 

 and other ancient authors as generic, which names never before were 

 heard of, and nearly all of which are used to supercede the work of com- 



