464 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [Dec, 'l/ 



the names of genera of Noctuidae from those used in my vol- 

 umes in the "Catalogue of Lepidoptera Phalaenae in the Brit- 

 ish Museum." It is instructive to compare his paper with what 

 he wrote in the "Contributions to the Natural History of the 

 L.epidoptera of North America," Vol. i. No. 6 (1912). The 

 corrected names have since appeared in the most useful "Check 

 List of the Lepidoptera of Boreal America," published by Dr. 

 W. Barnes and himself. Many of his corrections are wrong, 

 judged by his own method of selecting the types of genera as 

 fixed by the "law of the first reviser." Of this, however, I 

 will onlv give a single instance: in Haworth's description of 

 the gems^Phytomctra, Lep. Brit., p. 254 (1809), the charac- 

 ters given for the genus include those of the larva and the 

 generic name is taken from the habits of the larva. Now 

 Haworth only knew the lar\^ae of two of the species on his 

 list, feshicae and gamma, therefore one of them must be the 

 type of the genus. Mr. McDunnough places both of them in 

 the genus Autographa Hiibn., and it was "ultra vires" on the 

 part of Stephens and Westwood to "fix" the type of Phyto- 

 mctra as oenea = viridaria Clerck, of which Haworth did not 

 know the larva, and Mr. McDunnough is wrong in following 

 them. Plusia Treit., type amcthystiua. is the same as Tclesilla 

 H. S. and has priority over it as stated in my Vol. xiii, p. 45.-2. 

 Ochsenheimer's generic names in the Noctuidae are nondescript 

 and should date from Treitschke's descriptions in 1825. except 

 such as were described by Latreille, Nouv. Diet. Hist. Nat. 

 xxiii (hei. Sept. i, 1818) and Zineken in Ersch and Griiber, 

 Allg. Encyc. AMss., Vols. i. iii. iv (aft. Sept. i, 1818) ; in the 

 Geometridae, however, as Treitschke is naming Schififermiller 

 and Denis' sections in the Wien. \'erz., his names will date 

 from 1825 and not from 1827-8. 



The "law of the first reviser" claims that the first reviser, 

 even if he does not "fix" a type for the genus, restricts the avail- 

 able species of the original author's list to such species as have 

 the characters of the part for which he uses the restricted 

 name, and that if ihere is only one such species on the original 

 author's list that species automatically becomes the type of the 

 genus, and so on with subsequent revisers till a type is "fixed" 

 agreeing with the characters given by the original author. It 

 would therefore be necessary to know not only all the charac- 

 ters of each species on the original author's list but to follow 

 them through each subsequent revision. It is, I think, only 

 necessary to state this in set terms to prove the absurdity of 

 "the law of the first reviser" as a practical working system. 



