58 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 
To this canon no exception whatever should be made ; for it would be . 
difficult to draw the line anywhere and gain general consent. Anyone 
who considers the subject, will see that one apparently reasonable excep- 
tion will lead to another scarcely less desirable, until the whole value and 
force of the proposed canon is destroyed. 
Pi The mere enumeration of its members, when known, is a suffi- 
cient definition of the limits of a a. and gives it an unquestionable 
claim to recognition. 2 
Although it is certainly ost desirable that every name proposed for a 
group should, when first propounded (or shortly after), be accompanied by 
a full description of its essential characters, it is evident that no one 
acquainted with the subject of which an author treats can fail to under- 
stand his meaning if he defines his groups by mere enumeration of their 
members. If, for instance, he designates the known genera to be embraced 
in a proposed family, he actually defines his group much better than he 
could do by a specification of its characters, since we have probably not 
yet been favored with any description of a natural family which gives 
everything which is characteristic and omits all that is not. 
Recommendations.—1. “‘ That assemblages of genera, termed families, 
should be uniformly named by adding the termination -ide to the name 
of the earliest known or most typically characterized genus in them; and 
that their subdivision, termed subfamilies, should be similarly constructed 
with the termination -inæ.” 
This recommendation, formulated by the committee of the British 
Association, is deprived of a great part of its value by the disagreement 
of naturalists as to the nature of family and subfamily groups,—assem_ 
blages of very diverse natures having received this designation at the 
hands of different writers ; indeed, up to the ‘issue of Professor Agassiz’s 
Essay on Classification, no one had ever attempted to give definite shape 
to current opinions upon the subject ; and it will be long before we shall 
see a general concurrence in either the views put forward in that work, or 
in any modification of them. Such being the case, it is evident that this 
recommendation cannot have the force of a law, nor be allowed any 
retrospective action. Otherwise these rules, or any other reasonable ones 
(however generally they may be accepted), are powerless to assign to any 
higher natural group a fixed and unalterable name ; but the group in ques- 
tion would receive a different name from different authors, according as 
they considered it a subfamily or an assemblage of still another nature. 
