378 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [DeC, '18 



Dates of Issue of the Plates of Guerin^s Iconographie 



du Regne Animal (Lepid.). 



By J. McDuNNOUGH, Decatur, Illinois. 



In 1909 (Ent. News, XX, 396) Mr. N. Banks had an inter- 

 esting note regarding the dates of this publication in which he 

 showed conclusively that the plates were published previously 

 to the text and that, if a named figure be considered valid (a 

 generally accepted principle nowadays, I believe), all such 

 names should be credited with a date prior to 1838. 



In connection with our Catalogue of North American Lepi- 

 doptera I have recently had occasion to go into the matter of 

 the dates of the plates of this work relating to the Lepidoptera 

 (Plates 76-91) more closely and find that in all probability 

 they were all issued prior to 1832. Henderson's English Edi- 

 tion of Cuvier's Regne Animal contains what are obviously 

 poor reproductions of all of Guerin's plates, our copy of the 

 illustrations of this work bearing the date 1834. We have not 

 a copy of Grifi^ith's Animal Kingdom (1832) available, but 

 it must at least contain reproductions of some if not all of 

 Guerin's plates. Mr. Banks, to whom we wrote regarding 

 these plates, has been kind enough to copy for us a note to 

 the "Alphabetical List of Species of Insects figured" which 

 reads as follows : — "Many of the species figured did not occur 

 till after the supplementary observations on the order to 

 which they belong were printed ; as these therefore are not 

 noticed in the work, a brief description of them is inserted in 

 this list ; descriptions are also inserted of all those published 

 by M. Guerin, in his 'Iconographie du Regne Animal.' which 

 have been copied in this work, no accounts of which have 

 hitherto been published by M. Guerin." It is quite plain there- 

 fore that Guerin's plates were merely copied in Grififith's 

 work and that Gray's descriptions incorporated in the List are 

 antedated by Guerin's figures. Rothschild & Jordan note this 

 fact with regard to Chlacnogramma jasminearum (PI. 84) in 

 their Revision of the Sphingidae, p. 95, although Smer'wthus 

 io, figured on the snme plate, is credited bv them to Grav on 

 page 331 for some reason that is not very obvious to me. 



