30 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



of authors whose systems were rejected in their own day, and whose 

 generic creations were ignored not only by contemporaries, but for gen- 

 erations afterwards, cannot properly be appealed to. If there was injustice 

 done to them it is too late to remedy it, and justice at this late day means 

 injustice to those in present possession, and whose title often has the 

 strength of nearly a century's undisputed possession. We cannot judge 

 of the circumstances that influenced the contemporaries of such authors, 

 and with the views prevailing at the time, their judgment was right. 

 Therefore, when Schrank, and Hubner and others, are sought to be rein- 

 stated, and a host of generic names set aside, the later injustice is worse 

 than the first, — if there was any first, and of that we have no knowledge. 

 Otherwise, fifty years hence a system or a genus proposed by an author 

 of to-day, though rejected by every naturalist living, for defects that appeal 

 to the sense of each one of them, may be reinstated in spite of such con- 

 temporary judgment. 



It has become more and more the practice, for twenty years past, to 

 ignore all genera created since Hubner, and to replace subsequent names 

 by names taken from that author, who published a Catalogue of Lepidop- 

 tera, in which nearly every species stands by itself, in a division that, 

 whatever it may be called, is not generic. Of course it is easy to apply 

 one of his names to every genus that can be now created. By his con- 

 temporaries, and for a generation after his works were published, his fan- 

 ciful divisions and fanciful names were rejected, and it is only of late years 

 that some authors have discovered that in his works is a mine of wealth. 



But on this head it is sufficient to give the words of an Entomologist 

 whose authority is second to none. I quote from the annual Address 

 (187 1 ) to the Lond. Ent. Soc, by Mr. Alfred R. Wallace, President of 

 the Society, and I quote at some length, as it seems to me desirable that 

 American Lepidopterists should be made aware that Hubner's claims are 

 not yet everywhere acknowledged : — " By far the most important 

 and most numerous alterations are caused by adopting the names of an 

 author who has long been purposely ignored as an authority for genera 

 both by English and Continental Lepidopterists. I of course allude to 

 Hubner. " 



" Such old names as Chionobas, Agraulis, Eresia, Godartia, Adolias, 

 Polyommatus, Leptalis, Terias, Callidryas, Thestias, Anthocaris, with 

 many more, are changed for others to be found in no other work than 

 Hubner's obsolete and useless Catalogue. Yet this wholesale change 



