270 THE entomologist's record. 



are utterly unlike. Turner's /.. 7iickeiiii=L. (junwei in shape, South's 

 L. nicliL'iiii is identical with L. testacea in shape. 



To sum up, we have {a) Five old authenticated specimens of an 

 apparently extinct species with a certain amount of history, the 

 genitalia nearly agreeing with /-. testaccu : {h) four unauthenticated 

 specimens without history, the genitalia agreeing with L. (/iicneei. 

 If the five specimens of L. ju'ckciiii. are only f.. testacea, why are not 

 Mr. Turner's four specimens only L. (lueneei f 



Until we can get further mformation I am afraid most of us 

 will continue to call Mr. Baxter's St. Anne's specimens Ln/ieriiia 

 (jiieneci, Dbd. 



[Mr. Pierce asks where my specimens of nichedii came fi'om. I 

 got them from Herr Max Bartel, and they are obviously rather old 

 specimens. So far as their source bears on the question I should not 

 place the certainty of their being nickedii at a higher or lower level 

 than that of Mr. Pierce's specimens. Another question Mr. Pierce 

 asks is, why in all these years did no one see that (/iieneei = ni(k<'dii .' 

 The material of both was very meagre, and few troubled themselves, 

 but those who did, ej/., Tutt and Hampson {Cat. Lep. Phal., vol. vii., 

 p. 471), were sure that gueneei was testacea, in which Mr. Pierce agrees 

 they were wrong. I only add that this error, which Mr. Pierce 

 .admits, consisted in not seeing that (jueneei was nickedii. Neverthe- 

 less, Mr. South [Ent., vol. xlii., p. 269) does identify nickedii 

 with (/neneei. He admits as probable that both (not one only) are 

 testacea, but obviously rather in deference to general opinion than as 

 his own conclusion. It seems certain that both my specimens and 

 Mr. Pierce's had been accepted as nickedii for many years. It is also 

 probable that specimens of testacea did do duty as nickedii from an 

 early period of its history, which may account for Staudinger 

 querying the right of nickedii to be distinct, though he does not go 

 beyond the query, yet he makes (iueneei = testacea. . Old series of 

 nickedii, then, probably were diluted with some testacea ; such I take 

 to be the history of Mr. Pierce's specimens, unless, perchance, his are 

 true nickedii that in the damages and repairs involved in the vicissitudes 

 of half a century have had testacea bodies substituted for their own. 



If, on the other hand, mine are the substituted specimens, then we 

 have gueneei as a continental species for many years, and get it mixed 

 with not testacea simply, but with a form believed to be a distinct 

 species, and called nickedii. It requires vastly less confidence than I 

 have, in the keenness and discrimination of continental lepidopterists, 

 to believe that (jueneei (being, by Mr. Pierce's hypothesis, distinct from 

 any other species they knew) could thus have eluded detection. I think 

 no one will be prepared to say that Freyer's original figure, and others 

 quoted, are figures of testacea ; thej' may be good or bad, but testacea 

 they are not. They are the species called nickedii in the British 

 Museum Collection, with which Mr. Turner finds that my specimens 

 agree, and if so, are, like my specimens, identical with gueneei. 



The point in dispute is not whether our determination of our 

 specimens by their genitalia is correct, a point on which Mr. Pierce 

 is facile princeps, but as to which of our specimens (if either) agree 

 with nickedii. On this I, at least, am very inexpert. It would be 

 very desirable if some actual authority in such matters, say Mr. Bankes, 

 would pronounce on this, the real question on which I difier from 

 Mr. Pierce.— T.A.C.] 



