379 



i6. Sphacroccntrus Intcus Buckton 244. PI. 56, fig. 6. All seven 

 from S. Australia. Probably not a Sphacroccntrus, possibly an 

 Acanthuclms. 



Family 3 Cercopidae. 



I have not had sufificient material ^before me to make many 

 researches on this comparatively small family, of which I now 

 describe 8 new genera, and 9 new species. I think however that 

 Stal's subfamilies are founded on characters of convenience, 

 not of real scientific value, for example: Aufiterna has the an- 

 terior margin of the pronotum straight, but it seems to me to 

 belong really nearer Polychactophycs, Ptychis, etc. Moreover in 

 some genera the anterior margin of the pronotum is so slightly 

 curved, as to be almost straight. 



Cercopidae are apparently not of very extensive occurrence 

 on the Australian Continent, the'r headquarters lying in Cen- 

 tral and South America and in the Oriental Region and the 

 Malayan portion of the Australian; thev have members how- 

 ever in every Zoological Subregion except the Hawaiian. 



As is the case with many other of the older Hemipterous 

 genera, Cercopis Fabricius has been employed at d'fferent times 

 for msny diverse forms. Stal (i86q, Svensk. Vet. Akad. 

 Handl., 8 no. i, p. 11), fixes carnifcx Fabr. as the type; it had 

 however aVeady been fixed as "spumaria Linn." by La<-reiPe. 

 C. cc^rnifcx is an Australian species unknown to me. and I do 

 not even know to what genus it now belonP's. Stal, in the 

 work above cited, alters h^'s Ccrcopis of the "Hemiptera Afri- 

 cana" (1P66) to "CosmoscartaJ' but does not redefine Ccrcopis 

 TFabr.) St?l: later, he adds fcrniginca (Walker) from an un- 

 known locality. 



C. 'spujnrria Linn.', moreover, is not defin'telv known. Hor- 

 vath (i8gQ Revue d'Entom. XVII (for i8q8) 275) examined the 

 Linn'^an tvpes and found the first specimen to be Aphrophora rhii 

 (Fa'len), the second Phihenns spumarii Auct., and conchi-^es 

 that the former fits the Linnean d'agnosis hetter, as that notes 

 "habitat in Sahce." This however is not stating the case quite 

 accurately; I>inne writes (1758 Svs^ema Naturae Ed. X. 43,7.^ 

 "Habitat in Europae Pl?ntis variis, frequens in Salice viminali. 

 latitans intra spumani," hut as sf>iiniarin of later Catalogues 

 never is found on Salix, I think Horvath's view must be sus- 

 tained; this is the view a'so of Germar, Dufour, Burmeister, 

 Rambur, Amvot and Serville, etc, 



