THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 385 



do not wish it to be inferred by my statement that I impugn the abih'ty of 

 many of these writers ; far from it. The fact, nevertheless, remains, that 

 no one is competent to discuss philosophically the classification of any 

 group of animal life who is not well grounded in the principles of taxonomy 

 as applied to related animals. And the ignorance of related Diptera has 

 been, more than once, deplorably shown by writers on the Culicidre. A 

 writer who persistently calls the beginning of the third longitudinal vein a 

 " supernumerary cross-vein," and the fourth posterior cell the " anal cell," 

 without in the least attempting to show that the standard authors on 

 Diptera have been greviously in error, is, from the very nature of the case, 

 incompetent to discuss classiticatory characters, since the mosquitoes are 

 not organisms isolated from all other living creatures. 



It may be urged, on the other hand, that not being a specialist in the 

 Culicidai myself, I am not competent as a critic, and that is possibly true. 

 I have, however, studied patiently a dozen or twenty of the so-called new 

 genera of the mosquitoes, and have a more or less critical acquaintance 

 with at least a thousand other genera of Diptera in all families, and I 

 humbly submit that it is not necessary, at least for one whose taste is not 

 depraved, to devour a whole sheep in order to detect the flavor of mutton. 



Until within recent years, dipterologists were content to classify the 

 known Culicidge in a half dozen or so genera, genera which could be 

 defined by characters equivalent to those used for generic definition in the 

 allied families. With the great impulse given to the study of the 

 mosquitoes by the marvellous economic discoveries of recent years, it was 

 only to be expected that many new forms would be brought to light, and 

 new structural characters discovered. The Culicidse in the past had been 

 generally neglected by students of Diptera, for two chief reasons : the 

 frailty of the insects themselves and the difficulty of preserving them 

 intact, and the recognized difficulties of their study. It naturally was 

 very desirable, with the great influx of new forms, both for scientific and 

 economic reasons, that relationships should be more closely defined than 

 had hitherto been done. The results so far have been that a few new 

 genera, based upon characters equivalent to those previously used, have 

 been established, and that the other old genera have been broken up into 

 scores of groups, to which the designation of genus has been, correctly or 

 incorrectly, applied. 



Theobald, in his recent discussion of the genera of the world, recog- 

 nizes about seventy-five genera, and has promised more. American 

 writers, with no less modesty, have proposed a score or so additional ones. 



