302 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



remarked that " if such a change was to be so brought about it 

 was a waste of time ever to write a book." Remarking on a 

 passage in Mr. Newman's * Natural History of British Moths,' 

 as to Mr. Doubleday having "approved" certain changes, 

 Mr. Lewis declared that what entomologists want is not that 

 changes should come to them " stamped with the approval of 

 this or that leading man, but that an author, who proposes 

 any change in nomenclature or arrangement, would first 

 state all his reasons, and then leave the approval to themr 

 Mr. Lewis strenuously protested against any changes in 

 arrangement being introduced in a mere list of synonyms, 

 and quoted M. Guenee as satirizing* the practice. As to 

 changes in names, he suggested that the legal maxim "Com- 

 munis error facit jus" might with advantage be applied in 

 cases of long-forgotten specific names, as he felt assured it 

 would, in effect, be, in the case of the misapplied generic 

 names detailed by Mr. Crotch in the Ent. Soc. Trans, for 

 1870; and he also condemned the insufficiency of the infor- 

 mation given by all the English lists, showing that none of 

 the lists stated the reason for a change of name, or whether 

 the discarded name was supplanted by a prior one, or found 

 to refer to a different species. With reference to Mr. Lewis's 

 criticisms on recent changes in the arrangement of British 

 Lepidoptera, Mr. Briggs remarked that Mr. Newman, in his 

 ' Natural History of British Moths,' had united Tapinostola 

 Bondii and Miana arcuosa into a genus termed Chortodes, 

 giving no reason for this change excepting Mr. Doubleday's 

 " approval." Mr. Briggs had examined the palpi of these 

 two species, and found they were very dissimilar; he con- 

 sidered, therefore, that this union of the two into a special 

 genus was unnatural. 



[I have unfortunately misled both Mr. Lewis and Mr. 

 Briggs in not having repeated in the body of the work the 

 information so clearly given in the advertisement, and cer- 

 tainly known to every British lepidopterist, that the arrange- 

 ment and names in my ' British Moths' are taken from 

 Mr. Doubleday's List. When, therefore, it appeared de- 

 sirable to deviate slightly from this announcement, it became 

 also desirable to consult Mr. Doubleday on the subject, to 

 obtain his approbation to the changes, and to state explicitly 

 that I had done so. — Edward Newman.^ 



