200 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VOL. 97 
Phalangium spinosum Montagu also belonged to the genus. It is 
quite obvious that Latreille had no clear idea of generic characters 
in the Pyenogonida, for these three species belong to widely separated 
genera. At any rate, Phozichilus Latreille (Stebbing, and Norman) 
has not been formally accepted in place of Pseudopallene Wilson by 
subsequent workers, although Marcus (1940b, p. 128) advocates its 
use. 
This affair inspired some eloquent objections at the height of the 
controversy (Loman, 1915; Bouvier, 1917). Certainly the delight 
that some taxonomists find in resurrecting these desiccated museum 
names—‘‘ces exercises byzantins!”’ as Bouvier (1923, p. 3) called it— 
is not the most praiseworthy occupation with which they might busy 
themselves. One cannot resist quoting Loman’s (1915, pp. 211-216) 
sentiments: “Et avec un soupir de soulagement ces mots nous 
échappent: Dieu, merci, enfin, nous y sommes. C’est arrété.” 
But Loman sighed for relief too soon, and it was no less a person 
than Bouvier who, despite his jibes at his fellow taxonomists for their 
exotic diversions (if one may thus freely paraphrase “exercises by- 
zantins”’), contributed the ultimate complication to this tangled tale of 
generic names. Although he had suggested, in 1917 (p. 29), that 
he had seen a specimen labeled by Latreille himself as ‘‘Phoxychile 
phalangioides,”’ which was actually a Pallenopsis, his information was 
greeted by a tacit conspiracy of silence. Perhaps no one took him 
seriously, but finally, in his last paper on the Pyecnogonida (1937), 
Bouvier described this specimen under Latreille’s manuscript name 
Phozichilus phalangioides, suggesting at the same time that it should 
be considered the genotype and that therefore Pallenopsis should be 
discarded in favor of Phozichilus. 'This is too much. In the first 
place, the existence of a named but hitherto undescribed species does 
not establish that specimen as a genotype, and such sedulous adherence 
to priority, while it may be a commendable gesture of respect and 
patriotism by one Frenchman to another, does no service to orderly 
procedure. Inasmuch as Pseudopallene spinipes seems to have been 
the first species formally referred by Latreille to his genus, it is the 
genotype by designation, and this Pallenopsis identification is simply 
another demonstration of his foggy conception of what constituted 
a genus in the Pycnogonida. In the second place, Phoxichilus is 
already a worn-out name, having been confused with two other 
genera, and to use it for a third genus, previously unsullied by such 
questionable synonymy, is confounding the confusion. Whatever the 
arbitrary rules may be, they are not immutable laws, and it would seem 
18 There has been no work on Arctic and European pycnogonids by English authors since Norman’s 
day until Lebour’s recent paper (1945). There were a few lists by Carpenter, in one of which (1912, p. 4) 
he suggested that “‘Phozichilus had better be dropped altogether.” I have already done this, in a previous 
paper (1943a, p. 88). 
