﻿379 



i6. Sphacrocentrus littcus Buckton 244, PI. 56, fig. 6. All seven 

 from S. Australia. Probably not a Sphaerocentrus, possibly an 

 AcanthiicJms. 



Family 3 Cercopidae. 



I 'have not had sufficient material 'before me to make many 

 researches on this comparatively small family, of which I now 

 describe 8 new genera, and 9 new species. I think however that 

 Stal's subfamilies are founded on characters of convenience, 

 not of real scientific value, for example: Aufiterna has the an- 

 terior margin of the pronotum straight, but it seems to me to 

 be'.ong really nearer PoIych':etop}iycs, Ptyclus, etc. Moreover in 

 some genera the anterior margin of the pronotum is so slightly 

 curved, as to be almost straight. 



Cercopidae are apparently not of very extensive occurrpn':^e 

 on the Australian Continent, the'r headquarters lying in Cen- 

 tral and South America and in the Oriental Region and the 

 Malayan portion of the Australian; they have memb^^rs how- 

 ever in every Zoological Subregion except the Hawaiian. 



As is the case with many other of the older Hemipterous 

 genera, Ccrcopis Fabricius has been employed at d'fTerent times 

 for m?nv diverse forms. Stal (1860, Svensk. Vet. Akad. 

 Handl., 8 no. i, p. 11). fixes cnrmfcx Fabr. as the type; it had 

 however already been fixed as "spmnaria Linn." by La+reiPe. 

 C. crnifcx is an Australian species unknown to me. and I do 

 not even know to what genus it now belonP's. Stal. in the 

 work above cited, alters h^"s Cercopis of the "Hemiptera Afri- 

 cpna" (tv'^66) to "Cosmoscarta." but does not redefine Cercopis 

 (Fabr.) St?l: later, he adds ferntginca (Walker) from an un- 

 known locality. 



C. 'shmirrh Linn.', moreover, is not defin'telv known. Hor- 

 vath (iSqq Revup d'Entom. XVII (for i8g8) 275) examined the 

 Linn^^an types and found the first specimen to be Aphrophora rim 

 (FaMen), the second Phihciuis spuiiiarh Auct., and concKr'es 

 that the former fits the Linnean d'agnosis "better, as that notes 

 "habitat in Sah'ce." This however is not stating the case quite 

 arcuratelv; Linne wri^^es (i7.=;8 Svs'^ema: Naturae Ed. X, 4.^7.) 

 "Habitat in Furopa-^ Pl?ntis variis. freciuens in Salice viminah'. 

 latitans intra spuma^m." bu<- as sf^uiiwr'vi of la^'er Catalogues 

 never is found on Salix, I think Horvath's view must be sus- 

 tained; this is the view a'so of Germar, Dufour, Burmeister, 

 Rambur, Amyot and Serville, etc. 



