164 THE entomologist's record. 



of careful research, and of intelligent discrimination, and it bears 

 no evidence of the careless and slipshod methods that distinguish 

 some American synonymic lists. Professor Grote is especially well 

 qualified to grapple with the difficulties that surround the subject ; 

 and now that he is devoting considerable and detailed attention to the 

 European fauna in the Hildesheim Museum, he will stand out as pre- 

 eminently the man to bring into working order and put on a common 

 base the dissimilar nomenclature in use in America and Europe ; for 

 however much individual opinion may differ as to degree, there can 

 be nothing but a general consensus of opinion that he understands 

 better than anyone else the complications of the American system, 

 which, to the average Eastern mind, has much of the intricacy of a 

 spider's web, wdth the supposition (or certainty) of a demon lying at 

 every nook and corner. In his particular branch the weakness of his 

 contemporaries makes us all the more grateful for his work, and 

 although he has not yet convinced us that his ex cathedra method of 

 selecting a type is at all a good one, yet it is a method, and as such 

 is infinitely better than none, and it is in the latter fashion that 

 synonymy is at present worked by our specialists. His footnotes 

 are to the point, often amusing, sometimes sarcastic, always interest- 

 ing ; but no author yet seems to know anything about British genera, 

 or to recognise that our generic groupings are usually more real and 

 more natural than the often large and unwieldy genera of the Conti- 

 nent. Professor Grote seems to have no more knowledge of these 

 than his contemporaries, hence his list does not help the purely 

 British collector much ; and yet this is hardly correct, for the genera 

 which we use in common with our Continental brethren are somewhat 

 amply dealt with. We would like to have a fling at Hiibner's Teiifavieii, 

 but forbear. Lord Walsingham is admitting its right to rank, and if 

 only our synonymists will settle something definitely and say — This is 

 the name, it can undergo no alteration ! we would forgive them much, 

 and we would even swallow our own personal opinion of the scientific 

 value of poor old Hiibner's Tentantcu. This List of North American 

 Noctuids is by far the best thing on American synonomy that lepi- 

 dopterists have recently had offered them, and we congratulate the 

 author on his careful production. 



SOCIETIES. 



At the meeting of the ExTOJioLOciicAL Society of London, Lord 

 Walsingham announced the death of Mons. E. L. Ragonot, President 

 of the Entomological Society of Erance, and, since 1887, a Foreign 

 Fellow of the Entomological Society of London. He remarked that 

 Mons. Ragonot was especially distinguished by his knowledge of the 

 PInjcidac (a monograph on which group he had brought out in 

 Russia), for his amiable personal qualities and for the readiness he 

 showed to assist other workers in the identification of species. Mr. 

 Stevens exhibited two larv^, supposed to be those of a species of 

 Anohiurn, which had been damaging oil paintings in his possession ; 

 also two specimens of a luminous species of Pijropliorus, which he 

 had received alive from the West Indies. Mr. Adkin exhibited a 

 portion of a collection of Lepidoptera made in Hoy, Orkney, in 1895, 



