BROWN: ANT TAXONOMY 571 



tinguished one. Creighton's claim that Forel described ants "with ability and 

 distinction," and his estimate that "among the great number of new ants which 

 [Forel] described comparatively few were synonyms" are concessions too charit- 

 able for me to accept without protest. After his promising start, Forel's taxo- 

 nomic career was one protracted degeneration into ever more hasty, careless, and 

 often pointless proliferation of new names. I doubt very seriously that the year 

 2053 will see as many as one half of the names proposed by Forel in good taxo- 

 nomic standing. Forel undoubtedly had a highly developed intuitive knowledge 

 of the distinctness and affinities of many of the ants with which he dealt, and it 

 is myrmecology's loss that he did not often pause long enough in his headlong 

 pursuit of new forms to make clear either their distinctive characters or their 

 real relationships. Excessive hurry, looseness, and confusion are the obvious 

 marks upon most of Forel's publication, and the pentanomial system his charac- 

 teristic medium of taxonomic expression. 



Carlo Emery approached Forel in numbers of species described, and sur- 

 passed him in genera. In his early years, he produced a number of very useful 

 papers, now all but forgotten, in which dozens of names from the old inquiren- 

 dae lists were hunted down and tucked safely into the synonymic structure. His 

 descriptions were more pointed than Forel's, and usually much more precise; 

 many of the abundant illustrations he furnished, while often inaccurate in de- 

 tail, provide the best evidence as to what the species of Smith and Forel are 

 really like. Emery spent a large part of his physically handicapped career in 

 the attempt to revise, classify, and key the species, genera, and higher categories, 

 and in his classic contributions to Wytsman's Genera Insectorum he produced a 

 unified system, key, and complete catalogue of the ants — the most useful work 

 published in myrmecology to date. With Forel, he followed the weird and won- 

 derful pentanomial system, but utilized it with much greater moderation than 

 did Forel when describing novelties. Emery worked well and conscientiously, 

 but the flood of unreliable contemporary description hurried him too much and 

 threw him off the track at important junctures in his classificationary labors. 

 Curiously, and unlike ]\Iayr, Emery seems to have expressed remarkably little 

 criticism of the work of his contemporaries, even though the constant inter- 

 change of types with Forel, Santschi, Wheeler, and others must have alerted 

 him to their inconsistencies. It was calamitous that these authors should have 

 been allowed to publish so copiously and for so long without the critical check 

 earlier exercised by Eoger and Mayr on the woi'k of Smith. Only late in his 

 life does Emery seem to have realized the extent of the damage done, as is ap- 

 parent in his angry but flagging attacks on feckless dabblers like Bondroit and 

 Donisthorpe. 



W. M. Wheeler entered the field in 1900, and within a few years produced 

 the general text, Ants, still in use but badly outdated. Wheeler's taxonomic 

 writings came thick and fast, and were similar in style and quality to those of 

 Forel, except that they were more frequently accompanied by illustrations and 

 keys and were often weighted according to biological information gained in the 

 field. Wheeler's work, like that of Forel, declined seriously with advancing 

 years. His best contributions to taxonomic myrmecology were, perhaps, his 

 studies on ant larvae and his treatment of the Baltic Amber fauna. 



The years following 1910 saw many specialists joining the rush to describe 



