152 GROTE — GENEALOGICAL TREES OF BUTTERFLIES. [Oct. 6, 



The object of this communication is attained by this brief review 

 of the genealogical trees of the butterflies in literature The 

 anomalous position of the Papilionides, assigned to them by Bates, 

 Scudder and the Scandinavian school of writers, has been the prin- 

 cipal cause of confusion. In addition, the methods of general 

 zoology have been neglected, and this neglect has led to a system 

 of false reasoning, by which the misplacement of the Papilionides 

 has been propped up. To all this has often been added a lack of 

 any serious study of the neuration. The fact that no monophyletic 

 tree of the butterflies will work satisfactorily and stand criticism 

 may be thus explained. 



The termination of Super family names in ides was proposed by F. 

 J. Buckell and adopted by myself in 1895. "^"^^ names Hespe- 

 ri[a]des and Papilionides are used by Dr. Chapman as early as April, 

 1895, but the former name is used for a group containing only the 

 Skippers, while under the latter title all the rest of the diurnals are 

 included. Thus Dr. Chapman's Hesperides equal the Grypocera 

 •of continental writers, and his Papilionides their Rhopalocera. This 

 is also the same as the classification by Prof. Comstock in 1893, 

 who gives the English names of Skippers and Butterflies to the two 

 groups, and ventures to say that **ifwe remove the Hesperidae 

 (Comstock's Skippers) from the division of the order, as indicated 

 above, the Butterflies form a well-defined group." The classifica- 

 tion, however, proposed in my writings is here opposed to both 

 that of Dr. Chapman and of Prof. Comstock, as well as to that of 

 all other authors known to me. The diphyletism of the diurnals is 

 mooted by no other writer and the idea is original with myself. 



The Papilionides appear to form a closed group. The Hespe- 

 riades appear to be an open group, open to the moths. The Nymph- 

 alids, or brush-footed butterflies, form several subparallel converg- 

 ing minor groups and seem properly regarded as an off"shoot (mono- 

 phyletic) from the main stem of the six-footed Hesperiades, which 

 latter culminates in the Pieridae. The parallelism between Leuco- 

 phasia and Heliconius supports this view. The Whites show a 

 specialization of the Radius, which the Nymphalids do not, while 

 retaining a more generalized stage of suspension of the chrysalis. 

 The fastening of the latter by the tail alone is copied exceptionally 

 in other groups of the Lepidoptera. Here we again have an in- 

 equality of specialization in the secondary (generic) characters of 

 the different stages, an observation made by mc originally in 1876, 



