Our British Plume Moths. 

 By J. W. Tutt, F.E.S. Read March 23rd, 1905. 



From the days of Linne, the " plumes " for many years were 

 held to comprise the Orneodid and Alucitid moths. When the 

 great distinction of structure between them was recognised they were 

 still considered to be closely allied. Jordan suggested that they 

 appeared to be allied to the Pyralids, and this was accepted as fact 

 by Meyrick and others. Chapman, who was the first to analyse the 

 structural details, and who recently said that to unite the plumes and 

 pyrales on neuration characters was much like uniting the Noctuids 

 and Tortricids, came to the conclusion that they practically had no 

 connection with the Pyralids, and, further, that they had no real 

 affinity with the Orneodids, from which they differed in all primary 

 characters in every stage. At the present time their real alliance is 

 unsolved ; they form, in the present state of our knowledge, an 

 isolated and separate superfamily, peculiar in their structure, their 

 natural history, and their habits. The man who solves — on scientific 

 evidence based on all their stages — the position of the "plumes" 

 will have added an important item to the lepidopterological know- 

 ledge of the world. 



A word or two about the eggs. The plume egg is a fiat egg — i. e., 

 its longitudinal axis is horizontal and its micropyle at one end. They 

 are exceedingly delicate, almost smocth, and roughly fall into three 

 groups — more oval eggs (Alucitid), more cylindrical (Platyptiliid), 

 and flat, flask-shaped (Agdistid). 



We may here state at once that the Agdistids are a very special 

 group, the wings not being divided into plumules in the ordinary 

 way — not that this is the only plume group with undivided wings, 

 for there are certain American species that appear to be ancestral 

 Platyptiliids, and one suspects that, with greater knowledge of the 

 exotic plumes, our present-day notions will be much modified. 



Linne called all the butterflies Papilio. He called all the plumes 

 Alucita. In his tenth edition of the " Systema Naturae " he included 

 moiwdactyla, didactyla, tridactyla, tetradactyla, pentadactyla, and 

 hexadactyla. Some four years afterwards Geoffroy created the genus 

 Pterophorus for three of the same species without giving them names, 

 although from the descriptions one knows that they were penta- 

 dactyla, monodactyla, and hexadactyla, figuring the first-named species. 

 The types of both genera were fixed as pentadactyla, and thus 

 Pterophorus naturally fell as a synonym of Alucita. Fabricius was 

 the author who kept alive the Geoffroyan name, for he called all the 

 plumes Pterophorus, and strangely transferred A lucita to a number of 

 Tineid moths. Most of the old entomologists, however, kept to the 

 Linnean name Alucita for the plumes, and they were largely known 

 as Alucitids, till Latreille, following Fabricius, called the ordinary 

 plumes Pterophorus, but separated hexadactyla under the name of 



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