168 Psyche [December 



M. clavata Stal the third antennal segment is more slender, the 

 fourth conical, in the long-winged form the costal margins are 

 distinctly curved, not parallel, and the discoidal area extends 

 slightly beyond the middle of the hemielytra; in M. lurida Stal 

 the third and fourth antennal segments are longer, scarcely cla- 

 vate; and in M. uniformis Stal the antennae are much shorter. 



QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE CONNECTED WITH 

 THE ANT GENUS LASIUS AND ITS SUBGENERA. 



• By William Morton Wheeler, 

 Bussey Institution, Harvard University. 



There seems to be no end to the nomenclatorial cataclysms pre- 

 cipitated by men who delight in resuscitating and reediting musty 

 entomological documents that have been unfortunately spared by 

 the tooth of time to plague those among us who wish to see taxon- 

 omy rapidly stabilized so that we may be able to give all our atten- 

 tion to more interesting and important matters. Just as we were 

 beginning to flatter ourselves that a few common insect names in 

 universal use for the greater part of a century must at last be 

 immune from the inroads of the resuscitators we are informed by 

 Morice and Durrant^ that our familiar generic name Lasius, 

 which has been borne so long by the common garden ant, probably 

 the most abundant insect of the northern hemisphere, must be 

 consigned to the synonymic limbo and replaced by a new name. 

 The case is so clearly stated by Donisthorpe in his excellent mono- 

 graph of British ants- that I shall quote his account of it. "Fab- 

 ricius (Syst. Piez., 415, 1804) published a heterotypical genus 

 Lasius for the reception of ten species of ants, but this use of the 

 name is invalid since Lasius (Type Apis quadrimaculata Panz.) 

 had already been used by Jurine for a genus of bees [Erlangen 

 Litteraturzeitg., 1, 164, No. 33, 1801: Nouv. Meth. Hym., 235- 

 238, No. 33, Pf. 4, 33, 11.33. 1807]. Latreille, Gen. Crust. 



1 The authorship and first publication of the "Jurinean" Genera of Hymenoptera: being a 

 reprint of a long-lost work of Panzer, with a translation into English, and Introduction and 

 Bibliographical and Critical Notes. Trans. Ent. Soc, London, 1914 (1915), pp. 339-436. 



2 British Ants, Their Life History and Classification. Plymouth, Wm. Brendon and Son, 

 Ltd., 1915, p. 186. 



