12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 73 



D. venustiis thus restricted, Banks included specimens from Wash- 

 ington, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, Idaho, and Texas. 

 No type locality, nor type is mentioned, as stated before. In the 

 absence of definite type designation the presumption in 1908 is, there- 

 fore, that the D. venustiis of 1908 and the one of 1897 are identical. 



Later in the same year Dr. Stiles (Weekly Pub. Health Rep., 

 vol. 23, pt. 2, nos. 27 to 52, July 3, 1908m, p. 949) briefly indicated 

 that Banks' D. venustus of 1908 was still a specific complex, separating 

 out from it, and for the first time diagnosing, the specimens from 

 Montana as Dermacentor andersoni [D. andersoni Stiles 1905, nomen 

 nudum]. Incidentally he also mentioned D. venustus as an allied 

 species from Texas, but gave no characters and mentioned no type. 



Up to that time there had been no published mention of type speci- 

 men or of the names having been tied down to any particular speci- 

 mens, except in the case of D. occidentalis. 



No further revision and subdivision of the complex took place until 

 August, 1910, when Stiles' paper entitled " the taxonomic value of 

 the microscopic structure of the stigmal plates in the tick genus 

 Dermacentor" was published ( Hyg. Lab. U. S. Publ. Health Mar. 

 Hosp. Serv.). In this he undertook a final revision of the specific 

 complex D. reticulatus as presented by Neumann in 1897. In this 

 revision he described fully and figured D. venustus designating " Marx 

 122 in U. S. National Museum. Host, Sheep (Ovis aries )in Texas " 

 as the type (holotype). As the final reviser of a complex group em- 

 bracing specimens from a large number of localities, some of which 

 had been variously named, he exercised his right to select the type 

 for such components as had not already been so designated. 



The case of Dermacentor andersoni seems to be simpler still. 



Specimens of this form do not appear to have been known by 

 Neumann in 1897, at least he does not mention Montana specimens as 

 being among the material examined by him, and D. andersoni is con- 

 sequently not involved in the revision of Neumann's D. reticulatus 

 (of 1897). The name appears before 1908 only as a nomen nudum 

 and consequently does not concern us until that year when it is 

 briefly characterized by Stiles (Weekly Publ. Health Rep., vol. 23. 

 pt. 2, Nos. 27 to 52, July 3, 1908m, p. 949) and said to be based on 

 specimens from Montana. Specimens from the latter State were 

 first mentioned by Banks in June, 1908, and by him included in his 

 complex D. venustus. In 1910, a definite type specimen of D. andersoni 

 was published by Stiles, vis., U. S. P. H. & M. H. S. 9467. This 

 specimen is from Woodman, Montana; host, Eqiius cahallus. 



