21G 



THE ENTOMOLOGIST S RECORD. 



— Clean 'em." It is too late in the 19th century for even such an 

 authority as Mr. Meyrick to he taken this fashion. 



We have already dealt with several points. In his preface our 

 author tells us that the work " is designed to enable any student of 

 British Lepidoptera to identify his specimens with accuracy." To the 

 collector class, who merely want to know the names of their insects, 

 we dare venture the suggestion that the Tables will be utterly in- 

 comprehensible. The average student will have already learned to 

 name his moths before he has reached the point at which he 

 would care to unravel such complicated machinery. To compare a 

 table like that on pp. 24-25 with Stainton's simple tabulations is absurd. 



We may be asked as to facts. The second species treated of is 

 Lit/idsia lutardla (pi/i/macola), and the erroneous information is quoted 

 (without marks) of " saline lichens " as food for the larva. Will our 

 author tell us how saline the lichens are on the Mendel Pass at 4,000 ft., 

 in the Cogne Valley at 5,000 ft., or on the Croda da Lago, where the 

 moth abounds ? On the first page we opened we saw Scoparia 

 bafiistrii/alis and S. ulmella had been telescoped into .S'. ambijiualis, 

 evidently a result arrived at from a superficial examination of the 

 imagines ; whilst we cannot conceive anything more misleading than 

 the following about Mdissuhlaptes hipnnctanxLs, that the " larva 

 lives in nests of wasps, heads of Inula, and probably on roots, but 

 habits hardly understood." We know this insect perhaps better than 

 anyone else in Britain, but would not like to be so certain of any one 

 of the facts as our author is of all. We wonder, too, whether our 

 author ever found the larvse of Phi/ris snatrlla "in a silken gallery 

 among lean's of blackthorn." We would also like to know where 

 Craiiihus (■(iuta)in'udlus is to be taken other than on the Deal sand-hills, 

 altliough our author makes it inhabit " Britain to the Clyde," nor has 

 its range, so far as we know, on the Continent yet been differentiated 

 from that of ('. salinellus. 



But enough ! The author is a bold man ; he has stepped out of 

 the beaten track ; he has neglected every authority who has worked 

 at the subject for the last half-century, and has produced a book which 

 will please — himself. It is a one-eyed book, compiled from one 

 narrow point of view, and one only. It ignores everything that has 

 been done, and gives simply the author's own view of entomology, in 

 our opinion, largely a false and erroneous one. The knowledge of the 

 general lines on which classification must proceed is too firmly fixed 

 for this or any other book to do much harm. The man who 

 thinks that he can collect all the information required to set up a new 

 scheme of classification of the Lepidoptera of the world, himself, must 

 be looked upon as being as retrogressive as his system. Mr. Meyrick 

 must carefully collect the tangles which Chapman and Comstock, 

 Dyar and Hampson, Kellogg and Packard, and many others have made, 

 and when he has got the threads in order he may have some hope of 

 producing a book based on a system of classification not only satis- 

 factory to himself, but to the entomological public. 



EuRATA.- We have to apologise for the many printer's errors in the last number : 

 p. 177 line I'J — " word '" should read " world," line 20 — " On " should read " In," 

 line 44 — "on "should read "in"; p. 179 line 13 — " Fevelation " should read 

 "revelation," line 21 — "unweildy" should read "unwieldy"; p. 182 line 

 — ^' xcaJmloniis" should vend '' aaJntlosux '^ ; p. 185 line 23 — "Dotree" should be 

 " Dobr6e," 



