PREFACE. Vll 



names, where misprinting or misspelling has marred 

 the author's intention and obscured his meaning. We 

 have not presumed to make any great change, or to 

 recoin a word, solely because it was barbarous and 

 malformed : in fact, our alterations are confined for the 

 most part to the insertion, rejection, or variation of 

 single letters, in cases where the error was manifestly a 

 typographical one; or, in cases where a species derives 

 its name from some locality or person, to effecting an 

 accordance between the title of the insect and the name 

 of the place, or of the Entomologist, in whose honour, 

 and to perpetuate whose fame, the insect has thus been 

 christened. In all such instances, the misnomer by 

 which the insect has been denoted is given in square 

 brackets immediately after the corrected form of the 

 name. 



It would savour too much of pedantry to insist upon 

 the invariable hard pronunciation of the c and y. That 

 the Greek * and y were always pronounced hard is not 

 doubted ; and some have maintained that the same rule 

 applied to the Roman c and g \ but on this point we 

 have deferred to prevailing custom, and have usually 

 softened those letters before the vowels e, i, and y. 



In one case we have not ventured to lay down a rule, 

 viz. as regards the accentuation of quadrisyllabic words 

 in which the penultimate and antepenultimate are both 

 short. Take, e. g., Cassiope and Corticea : in words 

 like the former of these, in which the last syllable is 

 long, there is no greater difficulty of pronunciation in 

 laying the stress upon the first syllable than upon the 

 second, and this is particularly the case in those words 

 in which the vowel i can assume the power of y. Latin 

 scholars are divided as to the proper accentuation of 



