302 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
remarked that “if such a change was to be so brought about it 
was a waste of time ever to write a book.” MRemarking on a 
passage in Mr. Newman’s ‘ Natural History of British Moths,’ 
as to Mr. Doubleday having “approved” certain changes, 
Mr. Lewis declared that what entomologists want is not that 
changes should come to them “stamped with the approval of 
this or that leading man, but that an author, who proposes 
any change in nomenclature or arrangement, would first 
state all his reasons, and then leave the approval to them.” 
Mr. Lewis strenuously protested against any changes in 
arrangement being introduced in a mere list of synonyms, 
and quoted M. Guenée as satirizing the practice. As to 
changes in names, he suggested that the legal maxim “ Com- 
munis error facit jus” might with advantage be applied in 
cases of long-forgotten specific names, as he felt assured it 
would, in effect, be, in the case of the misapplied generic 
names detailed by Mr. Crotch in the Ent. Soc. Trans. for 
1870; and he also condemned the insufficiency of the infor- 
mation given by all the English lists, showing that none of 
the lists stated the reason for a change of name, or whether 
the discarded name was supplanted by a prior one, or found 
to refer to a different species. With reference to Mr. Lewis’s 
criticisms on recent changes in the arrangement of British 
Lepidoptera, Mr. Briggs remarked that Mr. Newman, in his 
‘Natural History of British Moths,’ had united Tapinostola 
Bondii and Miana arcuosa into a genus termed Chortodes, 
giving no reason for this change excepting Mr. Doubleday’s 
“approval.” Mr. Briggs had examined the palpi of these 
two species, and found they were very dissimilar; he con- 
sidered, therefore, that this union of the two into a special 
genus was unnatural. 
[I have unfortunately misled both Mr. Lewis and Mr. 
Briggs in not having repeated in the body of the work the 
information so clearly given in the advertisement, and cer- 
tainly known to every British lepidopterist, that the arrange- 
ment and names in my ‘ British Moths’ are taken from 
Mr. Doubleday’s List. When, therefore, it appeared de- 
sirable to deviate slightly from this announcement, it became 
also desirable to consult Mr. Doubleday on the subject, to 
obtain his approbation to the changes, and to state explicitly 
that I had done so.—EHdward Newman.] 
