36 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Guide to the Study of Insects, has passed through three large editions, in 

 as many years, and is rapidly becoming the text book used in our schools 

 and colleges. 



The result is that a vast degree of attention is concentrated upon En- 

 tomology, a hundred fold, I venture to say, more than upon Botany or 

 Geology.and a thousand-fold more than upon Ornithology or Mammalogy. 

 In these branches, therefore, a disturbance of names would affect scarcely 

 any but special students, and if they do not care to resist innovations, it 

 is not our concern. But, from the nature of the case, in Entomology, 

 the advantage gained by disseminating information depends wholly upon 

 the precision with which the objects treated of can be identified, and pre- 

 cision can result only from the use of a common Nomenclature. If one 

 Treatise dilates upon the habits of an insect by one name, and the next 

 Report under another, and anybody may shift about the names, specific 

 and generic, at will, nothing can result but incomprehensibility and disgust. 

 What man reading the history of Papilio Asterias, figured with all its 

 preparatory stages, and colored to the life, in Harris, and the larva of 

 which species he recognises as one of the pests of his garden, will com- 

 prehend what the Annual Report of his State Agricultural Society for 1873 

 shall say upon Amaryssus Polyxenes? or, his old acquaintance, familiar 

 from boyhood, that he has been instructed to call Papilio Turn us, when 

 he shall read about Euphceades Glaucus ? Mr. Wallace well says, 

 ' Intelligible language is wholly founded on stability of Nomenclature, 

 and we should soon cease to be able to understand each other's speech, 

 if the practice of altering all names we thought we could improve upon 

 became general." 



I hope, therefore, that the Entomological section of the American As- 

 sociation, at its next Meeting, will adopt a new or amended Code, 

 having in mind the exigencies of their own science only, and that full dis- 

 cussion and interchange of opinion having meantime been had, such Code 

 will express the views of the great majority of the Entomologists of this 

 continent. If the Rules are sensible, they will recommend themselves 

 to the Entomologists of other countries, and in time secure general 

 adoption. 



