546 ^ CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



Neumoegen and Dyar's series of papers in the first two volumes of the Journal of the 

 New York Entomological Society was an important event and so, in a less formal way, 

 was Stretch's Zygaenidae and Bombycidae, published in parts. This last remained far 

 from complete; the plates alone were finally published without color in the Journal of the 

 New York Entomological Society in 1906. Hampson's Catalogue of the Lepidoptera Pha- 

 laenae (1898, 1900, 1901, 1914, 1920) gave us a world view for a few families (Euchro- 

 miidae, Nolidae, Arctiidae, Agaristidae, s. str.), but for the rest we still have only the 

 colored figures and short descriptions in Seitz. In the first part of our century, and in 

 earlier periods, this group was believed to be natural, being the Phalaena Bombyx, with 

 a little of the Sphinx, of Linnaeus; but it was gradually realized to be heterogeneous, 

 and the history of its major classification is that of the order as a whole. 



noctuidae: The Noctuidae start our century in wonderful confusion, which has not 

 yet been wholly cleared up; for Guenee and Walker published world revisions, while 

 Herrich-Schaeffer, followed by Lederer, studied the European types more fully and pre- 

 sented keys. Each author divided the group into a series of families, but none defined them 

 clearly, and no two wholly agreed. Also, it was already recognized that the deltoids belonged 

 with the Noctuidae, rather than with the pyralids, but only Herrich-Schaeffer and Lederer 

 made the union definite. There were also wide divergences in the use of generic names, 

 which were refiected in this country by the divergent usages of Grote and Smith, followed 

 later by Dyar and Hampson. Most works up to the First World War followed tradition 

 more than rules, and diverged in their use of both ; finally, after the war, more and more 

 authors began using the code of 1911, but their individual interpretations added to the 

 general confusion, and the rules often resulted in still further divergent uses of the older 

 names. At the moment, from the world point of view, we have about three-quarters of the 

 family in Hampson"s Catalogue of the Lepidoptera Phalaenae and in Seitz, a complete 

 view of the Palearctic fauna (such as it is) in Seitz, and the rest in fragments: the North 

 American deltoids by Smith (1895); a catalogue including also the South Americans by 

 Schaus (1916, with a key to genera) ; the fauna of British India (1895) ; and a host of 

 loose descriptions. In the pseudodeltoids we actually have nothing since Walker — which 

 means nothing at all, for very few were known then. 



The subdivision of the family falls rather sharply into two periods. The early work- 

 ers, like Guenee and Walker, divide it into a large number of weakly defined families; 

 Lederer (1857) already saw it as a unit, but takes up these "families" in discussion; and 

 through the rest of the nineteenth century we have general recognition of the family as 

 single, but a similar protean series of groups, mostly treated as subfamilies. Hampson 

 (1903) presented a new system of subfamilies, based chiefiy on certain points used as key 

 characters by Lederer; and these, though recognized as partly artificial, have been con- 

 venient enough to serve up to the present. 



The Noctuidae even more than the skippers have been a main line in the study of 

 genitalia. In 1857 Lederer was already examining all the available species and figuring 

 the tips of valves. Smith, who for some decades was best known in this country for 

 their study, also limited himself as a rule to the valves, usually pulling out and mounting 

 a single valve, when he intended to save the specimen. About 1909 both Smith (with 

 Grossbeck as technician) and Pierce in England began making more complete dissec- 

 tions on a large scale, and the younger group of workers have brought the technique to 

 a very high level. (I was in the chain; Grossbeck taught me in 1910, and I showed some 

 of the rudiments to Pearsall and Busck.) 



geometridae: The geometers started the century just like the Noctuidae, with world 

 reviews by Guenee and Walker and more precise analyses of characters by Herrich- 

 Schaeffer and Lederer. Packard (following Guenee's system) gave us our bible for the 

 family in 1876. The present system of subfamilies was established by Meyrick in 1892 

 (Trans. Entom. Soc. London), and adapted to our fauna by Hulst (Trans. Amer. Entom. 

 Soc, 23:245-386, 1896); and except for some primitive oddities can be considered fully 

 natural, not a merely convenient grouping like the Hampson system in the Noctuidae. 

 More recent work is scattered, and pretty tentative as regards tribes and genera; it takes 

 the form of many small papers, and the fraction of a world revision written by Prout 

 and published by Seitz. Work on genitalic characters is fragmentary and largely unpub- 



