Bibliographical Notices. aa: 
clature. There is one absolute rule that may certainly be adopted, 
namely that no generic names should be regarded as valid unless 
proposed by an author who makes use of the binominal method ; 
and this would get rid of many of those changes of old-established 
names to which Mr. Pascoe so strongly objects; but it seems to us 
that the law of priority is the only one to which we can appeal in 
general, and that, while it should be applied with judgment, it 
must nevertheless be observed as strictly as possible. When Mr. 
Pascoe speaks of the common practice of the ‘scamping of descrip- 
tions, pour prendre date,” in terms of reprobation, we cordially 
agree with him. ‘This sort of thing isa growing vice and a growing 
evil. 
Besides his list of British Beetles, which appears to have been 
compiled with great care, Mr. Pascoe has furnished the students of 
his little book with a most important help in the investigation of 
the native species of this order, in the form of a series of tables of 
families and genera. Of course, it is always a very difficult matter 
te make out the genera of any group of insects or other animals 
from the best-prepared tables alone; there are shades of character. 
that cannot be.conveyed by the short phrases necessarily used in a 
table; but no worker in the present day can overlook the value of 
such guides through the labyrinth of classification. As the author 
himself says, the characters selected as most convenient for the 
purposes of these tables are not always the most important: but 
we have glanced through many of them and examined some care- 
fully ; and, so far as we can see, they are eminently practical, and 
convey a great amount of useful information in a condensed form. 
There is one good thing that we may fairly wish to British ento- 
mologists ; and that is, that Mr. Pascoe may be able to follow up this 
book with similar manuals of the other orders of the class. 
Rhopalocera Malayana: a Description of the Butterflies of the Malay 
Peninsula. By W.L. Distant. Part I. London (West, New- 
man, & Co., Hatton Garden) & Penang. 
Leprpoprerists, and especially the students of the Rhopalocera 
section, ought to esteem themselves very fortunate in the liberal 
way in which they are catered for by the authors of Butterfly 
faunas, a class of books which ought to facilitate very considerably. 
the determination of species, and give more copious information 
regarding distribution and local variation than can be found else- 
where. The number of works of this description recently finished 
or in course of publication is quite large; and most of them form 
handsome volumes in quarto size, richly illustrated with coloured: 
figures. Some of these publications, we regret to observe, seem 
scarcely calculated to advance the department of biology to which 
they are devoted, the authors seeming to have no other object than: 
the bare description or enumeration of the species as an aid in 
the naming of collections; they invite students to a mere Barme- 
