i6 



BOOK NOTICES. 



Butterflies; their Structure, Chaxges, and Life Histories, with 

 special reference to AiiicMcaa forms ; be njj; an application of the Doc- 

 trine of Descent to the study of Butterflies. VViih an Appendix of 

 Practical Instructions, by SAMUEL H. SCUUDER. New Yoric, Henry 

 Holt & Co., 1881. 



This book will be read by every Lepidopterist with mingled interest and 

 disappointment; many highly important lacts are given, and ingenious and proba- 

 ble deductions made trom them; on the other hand, exploded fallacies are gravely 

 used as proved facts, and from them necessarily erroneous general laws deduced. 

 It is sufficient to mention the alleged fact that individuals of Danafs .Irchippus 

 develope and lay their eggs one after ano:her for a year and a half, and to reter 

 to the alleged parallel generations of Argy7inis Myrina Mr. W. H. Edwards, 

 years ago had shown the errors of observation and deducnon involved in both 

 of these cases, but here they appear in their original guise without note or com- 

 ment. 



Very few authors later than 1850 are que ted; the note on p. 204 fixes the 

 date of the book as before 1877, when indeed the whole of it was delivered as a 

 seiiesof Lowell Lectures at Cambridge several years before 1877; however, dif- 

 ferent portions of this book had appeared in various magazines, as the story 

 of Myrina in 1872, of Archippus in 1876 and other sections in 1877. This 

 would be no disadvantage if the work had been properly revised with reference 

 to the advances made in the last decade, but unfortunately this has not been 

 done. The works of Weismann — since 1874 the best autnor on color pattern 

 and seasonal dimorphism — are ignored, although twenty pages are devoted to 

 the first of these subjects and nearly as m^ny to the other. So are those of 

 Paul Mayer — the only authority at present on the ancestry of insects — and 

 Hatscheck's Embryology of Lepidoptera published several years ago, whch 

 singularly contradicts the statement on p. 10, that "very little is known * =^ of 

 the formation of the emoryonic caterpillar." , 



The drawings in the " Butterflies " are generallv good, but seme "are very 

 bad ; for example the eggs of Hypop/ila'as, p. 7, Philodice and Thoe, p. 8. 

 The latter looks something like a Parnassiiis *:^'g, but in neither shape nor 

 marking bears any resemblance to that of C. Thoe, which is very much flat- 

 tened and studded with large starry projections. The drawings from Harris 

 are inserted without any correction, or even men'ion of the very roticeabl- error 

 which IS pointed out in Harris' preface— the artist having provided four footed 

 butterflies with a superfluous front pair of iegs in thirteen instances. In spite 

 of such matters of detail the work is valuable for any beginner bold en. ugh to 

 try to untangle such a Chinese puzzle as the author's nomenclature, which s ct- 

 tirely original and adopted by h ms^lf only, either here or abroa.i. As a reu-wer 

 in Nature points out, the recognized standard works of systematic non mc a- 

 ture should be followed in a book intended for beginners and sucn innovanons 

 relegated to technical papers. The genera are those of Mr. Scudder's "Svs'.e- 

 matic Revision and were shown to be valueless by Messrs. Peabody and Mead 

 in the Canadian Etomologisf ; if anyone cares for more informa'ion as to this 

 matter, the last number cf that journal (December 1881 ) may be referred to. 



Particular attention is call to the introduction of English names as an 

 improvement in the system of Linnaeus. Open where you please and you meet 

 such names as the Banded Purple, the Viceroy, the Monarch, the iJIue-eyed 

 Grayling, The Tiger Swallow-tail, etc., and usually without reference in the 

 text by which the student may know what insect is meant, though this information 

 may be obtained by reference to a glossary in the appendix. 



Let us analyze one of the expressions, for example the Red Spotted Purple. 

 Basilarchia Astyanax, meaning Limenitis Ursula. In the first place it is not 

 red-spotted, in the next place it is not purple, in the next place there is no such 

 genus as Basilarchia, and in the last place Astyanax is a resurrected name un- 



