54 Journal New York Entomological Societv. [Voi. xvn. 



able. The ending occurs in a host of other words and is a contrac- 

 tion. Myrmex, the ant, is fiuptd^ (10,000) plus ^.v. It was once 

 muriamike (feminine). In Latin it became by natural transition for- 

 ftiica. To the Greek mind the ant was that insect which lives in large 

 colonies. To them, primitively, all hosts too numerous to count were 

 ";;/j77(7." As a theory I would suggest that ex is quite like the 

 Latin — io, meaning " that which." The philologist must pursue the 

 verb roots, cim, sph, a//, etc. 



Inasmuch as the word sphex is equivalent to the Latin vespa, Ger- 

 man Wespe, English wasp, with equivalents in other languages of 

 Indo-European origin, it is evident that the name was applied before 

 the great emigrations. In Greek it occurs in Herodotus. Apis was 

 applied before ihc emigration to Greece and Italy, but after the North- 

 ern emigration. The English word bee, like buzz, is purely onomato- 

 poetic. The word formica is coeval with apis. The English " ant'' 

 is a contraction of emmet. The English "beetle" is the "little 

 biter." The children named these as most others. They merely 

 supposed that the creature bit. The primitive men had no time to 

 investigate. They felt the sting of the sphex hundreds of generations 

 before they discovered the beneficence of the honey-bee. 



Most of the other names occurring in classic literature can only be 

 considered separately. Bitprestis is from Hippocrates, meaning an 

 insect which when eaten by cows caused swelling and generally death. 

 Here is an obvious mistranslation by Linne. Cows cannot reach this 

 woodborer. Possibly Hippocrates had an imperfect knowledge of the 

 dipterous creature which develops from the egg laid on the fetlock and 

 after being licked into the mouth passes first into the stomach and 

 thence through the tissues to the surface. 



Carabus (Aristotle) has no connection with the Egyptian word 

 rendered in Greek scarabceus. The similarity in sound apparently 

 deceived the lexicographers and the unobservant Greek as well. The 

 curved mandibles of the Carabid marked it to the children's mind 

 as differing from the branching mandibles of the staghorn beetle. 

 Linnaeus translated correctly. The Latin for staghorn is unmistak- 

 ably the Lucaniis, as described in Pliny. The painstaking scholar 

 who noted sadly that the Lucanus cervus is not as common in Lucania 

 as elsewhere, should read the joke book. The predecessor of Pliny 

 had his fling at the rural Lucanian tribe, whether the term applied 

 to the big arms, lumbering gait, hooked noses or prognathous jaws. 



