1911] Composition of Taxonomic Papers 213 



Especially in taxonomic entomology the saying holds good: 

 "Familiarity breeds contempt" — for others. Some taxonomists 

 appear to become so obsessed with their particular specialty 

 that other orders or families of insects do not exist for tnem. 

 There are 18 other orders after Comstock, 30 others after 

 Handlirsch (restricted to Pterygogenea — winged insects) ; yet 

 these are of little importance beyond the fact that they exist 

 and that some foolish people bother about them. So taxo- 

 nomists of a certain type would have us believe. We are lucky, 

 indeed, if with indignant compassion they will cite the family 

 in which the order occurs; indignant, because "those bar- 

 barians" do not happen to take any special interest in their 

 particular branch. 



Let us go a step farther. There are eighty-two families in 

 the order Coleoptera, sixty-one in Diptera, about seventy-five 

 in Lepidoptera, about seventy in Hymenoptera, not to speak of 

 Hemiptera, Neuroplera, Pseudoneuroptera, and other orders. 

 A conservative estimate would show over four hundred families 

 of insects in North America alone, distributed in nineteen 

 (Comstock) or thirty-one (Handlirsch) orders. Most of these 

 families average three to four subfamilies to each family, and 

 two tribes to each subfamily. Figuring on this basis there are 

 1200 subfamilies and 2400 tribes of insects. And this for North 

 American insects only! What of the orders, the families, the 

 subfamilies, the tribes, the genera, of fishes, of mollusks, of 

 birds, of mammals, of crustaceans, etc. in North America? 

 What of their number in the entire world ? Not all our articles 

 are confined to a single fauna. The Central and South Ameri- 

 can faunas are beginning to be explored more thoroughly, as 

 shown by the ever increasing number of articles upon the 

 regions named. 



And yet, on an average but six out of twenty titles cite the 

 family, and but one of twenty the order. Of course, the fact that 

 the journal is specially devoted to entomology, gives me a clue 

 to the position of the genus ; accordingly I know that the paper 

 is an entomological paper, but that is all. But what of journals 

 dealing with natural history in general ? How can I know from 

 the title whether the genus belongs to botany or to zoology or 

 paleonotology, whether it is a paper on insects or canaries, on 

 mollusks or angle-worms? 



An hour spent in a scientific library in the classification of 

 articles would be an educative influence for all those who neglect 



