62 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Now, Hulst described Soviatolophia umbripennis (Trans. Am. Ent. 

 Soc, XXIII., p. 350) from a specimen or specimens, he does not say how 

 many, from Colorado, and from the description I should have expected 

 his type to have been a niale^ because he gives all the male characters in 

 the new genus he proposes for the species, and says not a word about the 

 female. He describes his genus Somatolophia minutely, telling us that 

 the male has no hair pencil on the hind tibiae, and has long pectinations 

 to the antennse, both characters at variance with the genus Aids. He 

 also tells us that the ist and 3rd segments of the abdomen bear dense 

 dorsal tufts of hairs, and in his description of the species umbripennis he 

 adds that the hairs on the ist segment in that species are black. 



Now, it seems to me absolutely inconceivable that Dr. Hulst could 

 have drawn up either the generic or specific description from a single 

 female Aids Haydenata. It is quite true that in the brief diagnosis of 

 umbripennis there are many points of resemblance to Haydenata. and I 

 have many times gone over the description with specimens of Haydenata 

 in my hand, but I have always given up when I came to those dense 

 dorsal abdominal tufts, which certainly are not present in the slightest 

 degree in Alcis Haydenata. 



The explanation suggesting itself to my mind is that Dr. Hulst had 

 other specimens before him when he drew up his description ot S. 

 umbripetmis, that he mixed with them this female Haydenata and that at 

 some later date the original male type in some way came to grief, leaving 

 only the female, which wa.?, not really conspecific, to represent the species 

 in his collection. But the point I want to raise is this : Ought we to 

 strike out the genus and species on the evidence of a specimen marked 

 type when it is evident that that specimen was not the one from which the 

 original descriptions were made ? For my own part I doubt the propriety 

 of doing this, so I shall for the present retain the names in the expectation 

 that sooner or later the genuine Somatolophia umbripetmis will come to 

 light. 



A similar case is that of Diastidis festa. Dr. Dyar says that the 

 type is a specimen of the moth subsequently named by Hulst himself, 

 Deilinia pulveraria. Here the description of festa (Trans. Am. Ent. 

 Soc, XXVII., p. 335j is manifestly that of a Diastidis., not a Deilinia, 

 and in this case, too, I am convinced that the specimen now doing duty 

 as type cannot be the one from which the species was described. For 

 the present, therefore, I retain D. pulveraria on our lists as a good 

 species and not a synomyn of festa. The moth in question (ptdveraria) 

 is not rare in the Kootenay district. 



