276 



XXVII. Rectification of Treitschke's use of Hiibner's 

 generic term "Cynnatophora" 



BY LEON F. HARVEY, A. M., M. D. 

 [Read before this Society, February 13, 1874. J 



"Cymatophora," a generic term, first appears in Hiibner's Ten- 

 tamen.* The date of that paper cannot be now, perhaps, accu- 

 rately ascertained, but we can sufficiently approximate it, for our 

 present jiurpose. In his "Verzeichniss" (1816), Hiibner makes 

 mention of the Tentamen in the preface, saying that he had in- 

 tended publishing a catalogue, and had issued the Tentamen as a 

 preliminary step. We also find an allusion to it in the fourth vol- 

 ume of Ochsenheimer's work (afterwards continued by Treitschke), 

 published in 181G, in the following words: "Dieses Blatt kam mir 

 erst lange nach dem Abdrucke des dritten Bandes zu Gesichte, 

 daher konnte ich friiher nichts davon aufnehmen." Therefore it 

 must have been issued between the years 1808 and 1816. 



"Whilst studying the Geometridae, my attention was called to 

 Hiibner's use of the term Cymatophora in his Samm. Exot. Sch. 

 He gives in his Tentamen, under the Geometridae, the European 

 Eoboraria as the type of his genus Cymatophora, which shows that 

 Treitschke had no authority for his later use of that generic term 

 in the Noctuidae. If now, in 1874, we read the Verzeichniss, we 

 must be struck with the fact that we are realizing Hiibner's con- 

 ceptions in 1816, to a much greater extent than before. And we 

 must feel that his general ideas of classification, with so scant ma- 

 terial upon which to base his conclusions, Avitli but few predecessors 

 to have broken ground for him, were good. We can now see that 

 his conceptions of the proper divisions and subdivisions of the 

 Lepidoptera were far truer than those of the writers by whom he 

 was more immediately followed. Whilst Hiibner in his life-time 



♦Reprinted in fac simile by Samuel H. Scudder, Cambridge, U. S. A., 1873. 



