66 Mr. 0. J. Gahan — Notes on (Jleridae. 



In an appendix appearing at tlie end of the same volume he 

 added to the genus another species — seorguttatus, Fab. These 

 species are not all congeneric, and the question has arisen, 

 which species is to be regarded as the type of the genus ? 

 In one of his papers, Mr. Gorham has rashly stated that 

 Fabricius clearly indicated formicarius as the type. He did 

 nothing of the kind. If there is any indication by Fabricius 

 of the type, that type must be mutillarius ; for in a later 

 work — Syst. Eleuth. i. p. 279 (1801) — we find this species 

 followed by a description of the generic characters, and it 

 seems to have been a practice with Fabricius in some of his 

 works to add the generic characters immediately after the 

 species from which they were chiefly drawn. But the case 

 for mutillarius does not stop here. Two of the original four 

 species, the two last, were in the Syst. Eleuth. removed by 

 Fabricius to the genus Trichodes. Of the four, there re- 

 mained nowpnly the two first. Clerus formicarius became 

 subsequently the type of Latreille's genus Thanasimus, and 

 then only mutillarius was left. Nearly half a century later 

 mutillarius was made the type of another name — Pseudo- 

 clerops, Jacq. du Val. It is Herr Schenkling's contention 

 that as all these four species have gone from the genus, we 

 must now take the species of the supplement as the type. 

 With this I cannot agree, for the simple reason that it is 

 absurd to take as the type of a genus a species that was 

 apparently unknown to the author at the time when he first 

 described the genus. And so I am forced to maintain that 

 Clerus mutillarius, Fab., is the type of the Fabrician genus 

 Clerus. 



Noio.rus is another of those names first proposed by 

 Geoffroy, but in which all the rights of priority have passed 

 over to Fabricius. At present, the name is used for a genus 

 of Heteromera, and it was obviously invented to express a 

 character of that genus ; but for a very long time it was 

 applied to a genus of Clerida?. ; and now, so far as I can see, 

 we shall have to use it in that sense again, to take the place 

 of Opilo, Latr. Fabricius (Syst. Ent. p. 158) applied the 

 name first to two species — mollis, Linn., and monoceros, 

 Linn. Later (Syst. Eleuth.), he placed monoceros in the 

 genus Anihicus, while under Noto.rus he has ranged the 

 following species, all Cleridas : porcatus, Fab., violaceus, 

 Fab., mollis, Linn., indicus, Fab., and chinensis, Fab. Unless 

 it can be shown that some other author had in the meantime 

 used Notoxus in a different sense, it seems clear that we 

 must take mollis, Linn., to be the type of that genus. 



