DR. F. LEUTHNER ON THE ODONTOLABINI. 387 
I have much pleasure in acknowledging my obligations to Dr. Giinther, the Keeper 
of the Zoological Department of the British Museum, and to the Entomologists of the 
department, Messrs. Butler, Waterhouse, and Kirby, as well as to the gentlemen 
mentioned in the last paragraph, and to Prof. Westwood in Oxford; Prof. Blanchard, 
Count Constantine Branicki, and Prof. Waga in Paris; Prof. Valery-Mayet and Prof. 
Sabatier in Montpellier; Prof. Brauer and Herr Ganglbauer in Vienna; Prof. Carl 
Vogt and Dr. Frey-Gessner in Geneva; Herren Schneider and Knecht in Basel; Prof. 
Aurivillius in Stockholm; Herr Ritsema in Leyden; but above all to Major Parry 
and Herr van Lansberge, without whose assistance the completion of the present 
treatise would have been impossible. 
PART I. 
IntTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 
Scientific observations in natural history imperatively require exactitude in observa- 
tion, accuracy in discrimination, and precision in description. The industry of describers 
has made us acquainted with an innumerable multitude of forms of both animals and 
plants, and has placed an enormous mass of material at our disposal. 
But the anxiety to give names to everything has saddled science with a burden of 
synonymy, partly due to authors being unaware of what had previously been published, 
but partly, it is to be feared, to less excusable causes, such as vanity, and the desire to 
write “mihi” after as many species as possible. 
But the accuracy of subdivision depends on the acumen of the describer, and is also 
influenced by his desire to subdivide and rename, so that variable species are constantly 
broken up into so-called new ones. As a terrible example of this tendency, I may 
quote the case of a French botanist who has divided a very common plant, Drada verna, 
Linn., into no fewer than sixty-five new species'! ‘This shows us that a keen observer 
can detect many phantom species by examining a large series of any variable form, 
however common, although other species vary very little or not at all; and some have 
maintained their characters with unusual constancy for thousands of years, like the 
celebrated Taxodiwm distichum, which, as Heer states, is unvariable and has remained 
unaltered from the Miocene period to the present day. But such cases are rare, and a 
careful examination will generally detect larger or smaller differences between different 
specimens of known species. The tendency to variation has become sufficiently familiar 
to naturalists since the publication of the classical works of Darwin. Almost every 
large genus contains at least one species which may justly deserve the specific name 
of “variabilis.’ Such forms, as Haeckel ironically but truly observes, are always a 
nuisance to monographers, as the notion of a species becomes greatly discredited by 
1 Alexis Jordan, ‘ Diagnoses d’espéces nouvelles ou méconnues, pour servir de matériaux 4 une flore réformée 
de la France,’ &e. Paris, 1864. Compare also Planchon’s criticism, ‘‘ Le morcellement de l’espéce en botanique 
et le Jordanisme” in the ‘ Revue des deux Mondes,’ 15th September, 1874. 
3M 2 
