BROWN: ANT TAXONOMY 569 



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ANT TAXONOMY 



W. L. Brown, Jr. 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University 



When the subject, title and dates for this survey were suggested to me, I 

 could not but be struck by the coincidence of the century now complete with 

 what I see as a major, if not entirely progressive, phase in the development of 

 ant systematics. 



If we begin the history of our myrmecological century at 1853, we find al- 

 ready existing a primitive chaos of Linnaean binomials scattered among "For- 

 mica" and a few other form genera. In the heyday of the two-line Latin diag- 

 nosis, beginning with Linnaeus in 1758, many workers in the general field of 

 insect taxonomy — Fabricius, Latreille, Westwood, and otliers like them — ac- 

 cumulated a great many species of ants as mere incidents to their systematic 

 outpourings. Only Latreille, and toward the close of the period, Nylander, gave 

 the taxonomy of the ants more than a passing glance. 



In the few years closely centered on 1853, three men, Gustav Mayr, Julius 

 Roger, and Frederick Smith, entered the scene with publications focused more 

 or less directly and exclusively upon ants. The study of the family would un- 

 doubtedly be farther advanced today had Smith never chosen to look at an 

 ant, but this has been emphasized by so many authors already that I hardly 

 need labor the subject. Creighton, in the historical introduction to his The Ants 

 of North America covers Smith's work adequately and, in my opinion, with 

 considerable restraint. At one point, he paraphrases Forel as stating "with his 

 characteristic impetuosity . , . that neither Smith's species nor his types could 



