570 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



be depended upon," and continues, "but while Forel's annoyance is understand- 

 able, he obviously overshot the mark. It is only because of Smith's types . . . 

 that Smith's work was saved from oblivion." For myself, after considerable ex- 

 perience with Smithian species and Smithian "types" in the British Museum, I 

 can only side with Forel on this question. Smith himself, and a few of his con- 

 temporaries and successors in the British Museum, had a genius for mistran- 

 scription, label-switching, and outright substitution or loss of specimens that 

 has seldom if ever been equaled in the history of entomology. While it is no 

 longer necessary to add to the damnation of Smith's work, it is important that 

 the authenticity of his types remain open to question. 



Passing to Roger, we find a man of a different stamp. His publications are 

 relatively few in number, but the descriptions are very thorough for his day. 

 He had a remarkable eye for genera. He struggled, as did Mayr, with the con- 

 fused inheritance from the Linnaean period and with Smith's descriptive atroci- 

 ties, and he reduced a goodly share of the mess to ordered synonymic lists. In 

 all his work, Eoger showed caution and restraint in the face of the exciting bizarre 

 novelties then appearing in Europe from the corners of the world. 



In Gustav Mayr, we come to a truly great myrmecographer. While main- 

 taining other interests, he gave his best attention to the ants. Like Roger's, his 

 descriptions were meaningful and perhaps even more to the point. Mayr early 

 tackled the most important problem then confronting ant systematics — the gen- 

 era and higher categories. What needed doing then is obvious to us now largely 

 because Mayr did it. Starting with the Palearctic fauna, and then taking on 

 the exotics, he apportioned with great insight the known and new forms into 

 the familiar genera we know today, carefully characterizing each genus as he 

 went. Fighting to recognize and correctly place not only the tremendous back- 

 log of old species but also the spate from Smith's activity, he nevertheless found 

 time to describe a great many species with a clear sense of the significant charac- 

 ters and a conservative approach to intraspecific variation that present-day in- 

 vestigation is ever more solidly confirming as superior to the fine nomenclatural 

 splitting practiced by most of his successors. Mayr's names largely stand today 

 as steady reference points in the taxonomic maze. 



About 1870, in the middle of Mayr's course, Emery and Forel started their 

 prolific taxonomic careers. The parallels and divergences between their lives and 

 work has been covered by Creighton. Both Emery and Forel began with modest 

 and useful studies of the European fauna, and Forel completed studies of great 

 importance in his early publications on the comparative anatomy of the gizzard, 

 poison apparatus, and anal glands, recognizing most of the features still serving 

 to distinguish the major subfamilies. 



Forel, however, soon discovered the unlimited taxonomic possibilities of 

 the vast collections of ants rapidly accumulating in Europe with the develop- 

 ment of the colonial empires. His work on ants then largely settled down to a 

 routine of descriptions of exotic collections, one by one, and the numbers of 

 species, subspecies, and varieties bearing his name rose steadily into the thous- 

 ands. Creighton's estimate of Forel's descriptive efforts, while largely critical, 

 is surprisingly mild, perhaps owing to the relatively small role played by Forel 

 in the description of North American Formicidae. Even this role, as repeatedly 

 shown in the synonymy of Creighton's book itself, was not a particularly dis- 



