MasxELL.— Note on an Aphidian Insect. 17 
Observations on the name ** Cuermes ” or ** Kermes.” 
Much confusion has grown round this name, which has been made by 
different writers to do duty in various distinct directions. Linneus and 
Fabricius included under it Coccidm, Aphidide, and Psyllide ; Passerini 
restricts it to the Aphidide ; Kaltenbach, Buckton, and others seem to 
include in it Aphidide and Coccide ; Geoffroy, Targioni-Tozzetti, Signoret, 
and others restrict it to the Coccide. 
Now, there is so marked a distinction between the families just men- 
tioned that it seems simply absurd to confound them under one name. 
A number of characters which can only be well made out under the micro- 
scope distinguish them completely; but, apart from these, the fact that in 
the Coccidz the females are always, without any exception, apterous, whilst 
in the Aphidide the females in certain stages have four wings, is a perfectly 
sufficient cause for separation. Attempts have been made at various times to 
introduce a clearer classification, but, amongst at least English writers, with 
little or no success. This appears to me to be due in a great measure to the 
very small knowledge possessed by English naturalists of the family Coccide, 
a family which is apparently not abundant in England except upon exotic 
plants. In point of fact, most of these writers seem not to be aware of 
anything more than the single genus “ Coccus,” to which, although in 
reality it contains only the single species C. cacti (cochineal), they relegate 
every insect of the family." It is from some such want of knowledge that 
the name of ** Chermes” or ** Kermes” has been given to many quite 
distinct insects, even in some cases to Psyllide. 
I am quite well aware that names are not an end, but a means to an 
- end, and that a rigid and precise purism may be often absurd ; yet I see no 
reason why accuracy should not be aimed at in the case of minute insects 
as in the case of larger animals; and I can fancy the chorus of indignant 
and contemptuous expostulation which would greet an ornithologist com- . _ 
bining under one genus a hawk and a magpie, or a geologist including a 
trilobite amongst the saurians. 
The name ** Chermes " or “ Kermes ” is, so to speak, as old as the hills. 
It appears to have been originally given by the Persians either to the insect 
itself which produced for them a red dye (not cochineal), or to the dye thus 
produced. Linnæus applied the name to an insect which he termed Kermes 
ilicis, and unfortunately began the confusion to which I am referring, as he 
* Thus, for example, Mr. Beck, in the Journal of the Roy. Microsc. Society, describes 
at some length what he calls a ** Coceus " of the apple tree, which is, of course, Mytilaspis 
pomorum; and Mr. Buckton (British Aphides), who mentions constantly ** Coccus,” refers 
to an insect as “ now Coccus ilicis," which is not a Coccus at all, but a combination long 
ago abandoned of Kermes bauhinii and Kermes vermilio. 
