BITING MIDGES — WIRTH AND BLANTON 



259 



or fivefold, but until a considerable portion of the species from each 

 region are well described and a general fund of taxonomic characters 

 is made available to work with, no system of classification should be 

 attempted which would be more than a convenient way to think 

 flexibly in terms of groups of related species. We believe that the 

 literature and generic synonymies will be more easily handled in later 

 years if our first attempts to group the species phylogenetically are 

 done in terms of taxa outside the rules of priority and nomenclatural 

 bookkeeping. As certain groups become comparatively well known 

 and the relations of the species are worked out on a natural basis, the 

 groupings can be formalized with subgeneric names. For these reasons 

 we are proposing a tentative framework of taxonomic groups of the 

 Panama species, utilizing subgeneric names for some when these are 

 already available and appropriate, but refraining from proposing 

 any new subgenera at this time. 



Our proposed classification of the Panama species (table 4) serves 

 as a systematic check list of species and a convenient summary of the 

 most important quantitative characters used. The species numbers 

 in this table agree with the species numbers in the crossheads through- 

 out the text. An alphabetical list of species and synonyms is presented 

 on page 474. 



Table 4. — Systematic arrangement of Panama species of Culicoides with certain 



quantitative characters 



(Note: Except for segments having sensoria, mean values are shown. Asterisk denotes doubtful 

 position of species in group. Parentheses enclosing segment numbers indicate these segments 

 sometimes have sensoria) 



