228 Miscellaneous. 



Dionysius writes tills ; and this seems to be the correct form of the 

 word. Turning to Liddell and Scott's ' Lexicon,' based on that of 

 Passow, we have : — 



" tItis, Idos, ii, like TTtTTw, a small chirping bird, Phot." 



Now Photius flourished somewhere about a.d. 850 ; and looking 

 to his dictionary, i)rinted in 1S22 from the Gale MS., and edited by 

 Person and Bekkcr, we see (ii. p. 51)2) : — 



" Tiris : j^payv opriQiov' ar]j.iaiveL Ka\ tu yvvaiKeujy atcolop' Tins Kui 

 y icepKos." 



Stephanus also shows that tltls is the correct form. In his 'The- 

 saurus ' (ed. Paris : 1848-1854, vii. p. 2241) we have " titIs, Ihs, >/, 

 avicula," &c., and the sentence '^ ciJ.(Diftniif.aOai eh rhs KuXovi^ievas 

 TiTidas," which settles the matter. Moreover he adds " rirvs in vv. 

 LL. affertur pro riris." 



Photius and others after him derive the word titis from nrii^eiy, 

 otherwise written TrnrlCeii', to chirp. 



Hence we may conclude that tltls was originally a general name 

 for a small chirping bird, that in time it became specially applied to 

 some bird with a red tail, that as such it had one or more figurative 

 meanings (in the sentence above quoted we might perhaps trans- 

 late it by "Firetail"), concerning which we need not now trouble 

 ourselves, and that tlti/s is an erroneous form, Avhich has been still 

 further corrupted into tltliys, tetlnjs, tliytls, and I know not how 

 many other misspellings. 



Lastly, I may perhaps venture to hint that the root of tltls exists 

 in the prefix " Tit " of the English " Titlark " and " Titmouse," and 

 the first syllable of the Icelandic Tlilingur, where it retains its pri- 

 mitive generalized meaning. 



In excuse for occupying all this space, I may mention that natu- 

 ralists like Hemprich and Ehrenbcrg (Symb. Phys. fol. hh) and Von 

 Heuglin (Orn. Nordost-Afr, i. p. 334) have not thought it beneath 

 them to attempt an cxi^lanation of this Avord, referring it to r/rjjs, 

 ultor, with which it has nothing whatever to do. 



3 August, 1872. 



Neiv Names for a Jovg-laioxon Lepldojiteron. By C. Ritsema. 



In the last Number of the ' Annals,' Mr. A. G. Butler describes 

 and represents a new genus and species of the family Notodontidas. 

 The genus is named Tarsolejyls, the species T. remlcanda. 



The same insect, however, was figured as far back as 1806 by J. 

 Hiibner,in the second volume (plate 197) of his ' Sammlung exotischer 

 Schmetterlinge,' under the name of Grlno Sommerl, and as belonging 

 to the Noctute genuinoe. Herrich-Schiiffer (Sammlung neuer odor 

 wenig bekannter ausser-curopiiischer Schmetterlinge, p. 11) changed 

 the generic name as used before into Crlaodcs, and placed the insect 

 in the family Notodontina. "Walker, on the other hand, in his 

 * List of the Specimens of Lepidopterous Insects in the Collection of 

 the British Museum,' part xiv. (1858), p. 1346, places the genus 



