58 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



To this canon no exception whatever should be made ; for it would be 

 difficult to draw the line anywhere and gain general consent. Anyone 

 who considers the subject, will see that one apparently reasonable excep- 

 tion will lead to another scarcely less desirable, until the whole value and 

 force of the proposed canon is destroyed. 



III. The mere enumeration of its members, when known, is a suffi- 

 cient definition of the limits of a group, and gives it an unquestionable 

 claim to recognition. 



Although it is certainly most desirable that every name proposed for a 

 group should, when first propounded (or shortly after), be accompanied by 

 a full description of its essential characters, it is evident that no one 

 acquainted with the subject of which an author treats can fail to under- 

 stand his meaning if he defines his groups by mere enumeration of their 

 members. If, for instance, he designates the known genera to be embraced 

 in a proposed family, he actually defines his group much better than he 

 could do by a specification of its characters, since we have probably not 

 yet been favored with any description of a natural family which gives 

 everything which is characteristic and omits all that is not. 



Recommendations. — i. " That assemblages of genera, termed families, 

 should be uniformly named by adding the termination -idae to the name 

 of the earliest known or most typically characterized genus in them ; and 

 that their subdivision, termed subfamilies, should be similarly constructed 

 with the termination -in?e." 



This recommendation, formulated by the committee of the British 

 Association, is deprived of a great part of its value by the disagreement 

 of naturalists as to the nature of family and subfamily groups, — assem. 

 blages of very diverse natures having received this designation at the 

 hands of different writers ; indeed, up to the issue of Professor Agassiz's 

 Essay on Classification, no one had ever attempted to give definite shape 

 to current opinions upon the subject ; and it will be long before we shall 

 see a general concurrence in either the views put forward in that work, o r 

 1 n any modification of them. Such being the case, it is evident that this 

 recommendation cannot have the force of a law, nor be allowed any 

 retrospective action. Otherwise these rules, or any other reasonable ones 

 (however generally they may be accepted), are powerless to assign to any 

 higher natural group a fixed and unalterable name ; but the group in r ues- 

 tion would receive a different name from different authors, according as 

 they considered it a subfamily or an assemblage of still another nature. 



