1911] Composition of Taxonomic Papers 201 



least, there is good reason to doubt his exact knowledge of the 

 particular color. I do not say that this is intentional; it results 

 from overconfidence of his particular knowledge. This care- 

 lessness arises from the lack of proper standards. Accordingly 

 men are forced to formulate their own standards, which are 

 necessarily at fault It is only through an average or consensus 

 of opinions that standards are reached. 



In a desire to be conscientious men often circumscribe a con- 

 dition when the}' find their exact knowledge of colors inadequate. 

 This is usually done by the addition of such terms as "pale, 

 light, medium, shining, glabrous, bright, vivid, dark, dull," 

 etc., to the primary color. While this effort is commendable, 

 it offers no more certainly than the mere citation of the primary 

 shade; and the interpretation of the circumscriptiye adjective 

 is frequently very liberal. 



Probably the most liberty has been taken with the term 

 "fuscous" in our descriptions. This term has been made to 

 designate any darker shading on a light back-ground, begin- 

 ning with a tinge of the palest yellow against a white or trans- 

 lucent base to a seal or clove brown against any lighter back- 

 ground. "Orange," "yellow," and "green" are others of these 

 liberally interpreted colors. The heart-rending or laughable 

 (as one views it) puzzling of students, who are familiar with 

 exact anatomy but not with the vagaries of taxonomy, when 

 attempting to determine a species from description and to seek 

 conformity between the colors as given by the author and the 

 specimen in hand, affords too well known illustration. 



Viewing the matter from the stand-point of my own desul- 

 tory experiences, the question occurs to me: If at the present 

 time, when the approximate number of described insects 

 amounts to about 300,000 species, identification is difficult, 

 the determination often exhausting the patience of the taxo- 

 nomist in the vain endeavor to divine the protologist's percep- 

 tions of colors; further, this difficulty having encumbered tax- 

 onomy with labyrinthine synonymy; — what, then, will be the 

 condition of taxonomy fifty years hence, if we continue with 

 present methods, when species will have increased to approxi- 

 mately 1,000,000? 



Happily there is a tendency among our eminent specialists in 

 the last decade to standardize their descriptions as far as colors 

 are concerned. (This is beautifully instanced by Packard in 



