Prof. Frcy, and some American Teniina. 197 



scurit.y, brevity, etc., against American entomologists are meant to 

 give rise to any ill will. It is only the natural, paternal way of the 

 European entomologist when writing of the inferior co-labour in the 

 barbarous West ; the quiet, perfectly natural assumption by the Pro" 

 fessor, of the superiority of European work and European notions over 

 those of outside barbarians, who are being "educated up;" and it 

 makes no sort of difference whether the Professor has ever seen or 

 known anything about the subjects under discussion, nor whether the 

 outside barbarian has been all his life as familiar with it as "household 

 words." As Prof. Frey, therefore, meant no offense, none shall be 

 taken ; we shall write in perfect good nature, only for the sake of 

 science and the truth, using the knife only to lay bare such blunders 

 and errors as the Professor may have fallen into ; and when, as here- 

 after mentioned, he writes Lithocolletis gemmea, Frey, for Parredopa 

 robinlella, Clem., I shall not accuse him of tying his tail to another boy's 

 kite, but shall content myself with simply showing that the insect is 

 P. robiiiiella, Clem. , and can not, nor ever could, possibly be considered a 

 Lithocolletis. So, I propose to show that the confusion among Ameri- 

 can Micro-Lepidopterologists, of which the Professor says so much, 

 exists only in the mind of the Professor ; and, when the Professor 

 failed to recognize " common species," undescribed in any descriptions 

 of American writers, it may possibly be the fault of the Professor, , 

 and not of the descriptions, or the species may be new instead of 

 " common species ; " for American Micro-Lepidopterists know what 

 multitudes of undescribed species are yet to be found within the limits 

 of the continent. 



But I must, I fear, sometimes accuse the Professor of a disposition 

 for species-making ; and as to the charge of brevity in descriptions, 

 whilst we are glad to plead in extenuation so good an example in this 

 respect as Prof. Frey has set us in this brochure, yet, I must remind 

 him that brevity is the soul of some other things besides wit, and that 

 a description which by an apt phrase, or by catching and noting, as it 

 were, by intuition, or at a single glance, the real specific characters, 

 fixes the species, is worth a dozen pages of circumlocution, which at- 

 tempt to define by words some indefinable tint or shade, by which 

 some unnamed color passes into some other combination of prismatic 

 hues, incomprehensible to any sense but vision, and unnameable by 

 words ; as frequently happens amongst creatures of such beautiful, 

 varied, and ever-changing hues, as are some of these little beings, where, 

 literally, sometimes each several scale performs the office of a prism, 

 and the colors change with every movement of the object or the eye; 

 in view of all this, I can not see the urgent necessity that Prof. Frey 



