THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 95 



A REPLY TO MR. KIRKALDY. 



BY W. L. DISTANT, LONDON, ENGLAND. 



For some time past Mr. Kirkaldy has employed his leisure at Hono- 

 lulu by paying much attention, in the Canadian Entomologist, to myself 

 and my writings. It is beyond my desire to reply to his critical opinions, 

 but as regards the accuracy of some of his assertions, I must enter my 

 protest, as I have previously been compelled to do in the pages of the 

 "Entomologist" and the "Ann. Soc. Ent. Belg.," regarding similar mis- 

 statements made by the same writer in those publications. 



In the Can. Ent., XL, p. 453, Kirkaldy refers to Chimarrhometra, 

 a genus founded by Bianchi on a species previously described by myself, 

 and asserts with considerable disapproval that I " originally described the 

 species as Halobates." This statement is entirely inexact. In 1879, 

 probably before Mr. Kirkaldy had come under the care of his first 

 schoolmaster, I enumerated and described the Rhyncheta collected by the 

 late Dr. Stoliczka, during the Forsyth Expedition to Kashgar, in 1873-74. 

 In the same year I published some anticipatory diagnoses of species, 

 among others, of Halobates (?) orientalis, of which I wrote : " I have 

 placed this species provisionally in the genus Halobates, to which it has 

 great affinity ; its anatomical peculiarities and sexual appendages will 

 hereafter be figured" (Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1879, P- 126). A few 

 months subsequently this promise was fulfilled (Sec. Yarkand Miss. 

 Rhynch., p. 12, Plate), when I referred to it as " Gen. (?) orientalis" and 

 stated : " I have refrained for the present from making a new genus for 

 the reception of this species." At the same time, from the unique spirit 

 specimens (2), Mr. Rippon, the artist, gave no fewer than seven enlarged 

 sectional figures drawn by aid of the microscope. With these facts before 

 him (which I presume he had, or should have had), I have a right to ask 

 what justification Kirkaldy has for the misrepresentation in writing that I 

 "originally described the species as Halobates." 



Of the same writer's method in criticism, so far as I am concerned, 

 and published in American publications alone, I will give one example. 

 In the Trans. Amer. Ent. Soc. (1906), and in connection with a proposed 

 revision of the Capsidse, he (p. 134) placed the genus Angerianus, Dist., 

 in a tribe he proposed as Cyclapini. On p. 146 he actually enumerated 



