CHAP. II. | CLASSIFICATION AND NOMENCLATURE. 2j 



want is met by an artificial System of nomenclature which givi 

 name to everj Order, Family, Genus and Species of animal, i 

 different kind of animal being known by two names, those res] 

 ively of the genus and species to which it belongs. A knowlei 



of these names gives us a key to all that has been recorded about 

 the animals concerned. 



In olden times insects, which were then little studied, 

 known by long descriptive phrases, such as " the brown butterfly 

 which Hies in fields m the Summer," and it will readily be under- 

 stood that such phrases were not only cumbrous but often very 

 vague. In the middle ol the eighteenth century, however, Carl von 

 Linne. better known by his latinized name of Linnaeus, introduced 

 the binomial system of nomenclature under which every animal and 

 plant known at that time was given two names, a generic na 

 common to each group and a specific name peculiar to each 

 organism. This system was first fully elaborated in the Tenth 

 Edition of Linne's " System of Nature" (" Systema Naturae"), 

 published m [758, and this book and date are taken as the starting- 

 points of our modern nomenclature. 



All names are in Latin or. if derived from other than a Latin 

 word, they are required to be latinized, although of late years it 

 musl ssed that this rule is very loosely interpreted. When 



binomial nomenclature was introduced, a knowledge of Latin was 

 an essential equipment of every educated man in Europe and books 

 and descriptions written in Latin were therefore intelligible to the 

 educated of all civilized .Nations, liven nowadays short descrip- 

 tions of new insects are often written in Latin and this language 

 remains (nominally at least) the universal vehicle of zoological 

 nomenclature. It is true that the commoner and more conspicuous 

 insects of almost every country have acquired popular names but 

 such names have usually only a very local and limited application, 

 the same insect being known under different names in each country 

 speaking a different language or different insects being known 

 under the same name in different countries, whereby confusion is 

 worse confounded. The "Cotton Bollworm " of America, for 

 instance, is quite a different insect from that to which the same 

 name has been applied in India. And as I write there is before me 

 a popular book on injurious insects, issued in America in 1912, in 

 which one and the same insect is called in different places the 

 "Potato- fuller Worm," the "Tobacco Leafminer," and the 

 "Splitworm;" this insect has been called in India the "Potato 

 Moth," and it would be merely a wa to hunt up and quote 



here the various and yet different names under which this same 

 insect is known popularly in England, Germany, France, Italy. 



