Leng: Nut and Acorn Weevils 8i 



his usual clearness of perception and impatience of varietal dif- 

 ferences, partly clarified and partly confused matters. He fol- 

 lowed Boheman in calling the larger chestnut weevil caryatrypes, 

 named the hickory weevil caryae, misapplied Say's recUis to the 

 smaller chestnut weevil, and was thereby obliged to add quercus 

 for an acorn weevil; he also included under the name uniformis 

 all the short-beaked eastern weevils and incidentally mixed in 

 the hazelnut weevil, lumping what was left in fact all together 

 under Leconte's Pacific uniformis. To him we owe the first 

 descriptions of secondary sexual and other valuable characters, 

 but also the beginning of a confusion more or less blamable to 

 Say's insufficient description. 



In 1884 Blanchard separated ohtusus from the confused mass 

 Horn called uniformis and identified it with hazelnuts but failed 

 to connect it with Say's nasutus. A little later Hamilton sepa- 

 rated from the same mass a species he called confusor. He 

 noticed that the short-beaked specimens taken on oaks or bred 

 from acorns were not all of one sex, and that the females when 

 separated had always a much shorter beak than the nasicus 

 females. They corresponded in this respect with Leconte's 

 Pacific coast uniformis but differed in maculation. Hamilton 

 thus supplied, for the first time, a name for the seventh group 

 above enumerated, containing the acorn weevils in which the beak 

 is distinctly shorter than the body in both. sexes. 



In 1897 Casey published a synopsis of the short-beaked species 

 that Horn had lumped as tmiformis, recognizing Blanchard's 

 ohtusus and Hamilton's confusor and adding humeralis for the 

 Floridian form with the femoral tooth reduced to a denticle on 

 a swollen femur. Unfortunately he overlooked the original 

 locality of uniformis and misapplied that name to an eastern 

 form, renaming the real uniformis as occidens. The remainder 

 of the species he described in 1897 are western and do not con- 

 cern us at present. I think you will admit that up to this time 

 there had been enough blundering to make taxonomists regard 

 Balaninus with dread and their readers to look upon their speci- 



