PREFACE. 



In presenting volume iv of this work to my brother-lepidopterists, 

 I do so with some misgivings, due to the fact that, whilst it has been 

 passing through press, Messrs. Rothschild and Jordan have issued 

 their large and excellent work, A Revision of the Lepidopterous Fa?nily 

 Sp/iingidae, and have, as it were, thus brought my own limited 

 attempt into rather poor comparison with their own wider and more 

 comprehensive work. The scope and aim of the two books, however, 

 though dealing more or less with the same subject, are so widely 

 different, theirs being distinctly systematic and mine essentially 

 biological, that one, perhaps, may be considered as more or less 

 supplementary to the other. It has been a matter of great satis- 

 faction to find that, in many instances, where my collaborators 

 and I had found it absolutely necessary to make new and marked 

 changes in the groupings of certain of the species, Messrs. Rothschild 

 and Jordan have, quite independently, made the same changes, 

 with the result that we found ourselves most unexpectedly in agree- 

 ment with these authors on almost all points in which we had 

 expected to encounter hostile criticism and opposition from 

 the more conservative workers at this interesting superfamily. 

 This, in itself, is satisfactory, and, if the British lepidopterist finds 

 that the British species, which our immediate lepidopterological 

 ancestors have lumped together under the generic names of £>eilephila, 

 Choerocampa and Sphinx, have, in most cases, not only been placed 

 in different genera, but, in some instances, in different tribes, and 

 even (in the case of Daphnis nerii) in a different subfamily, we 

 can only urge that we are sinning in good company, and that a 

 critical review of the Sphingids of the world has proved, quite 

 independently to Messrs. Rothschild and Jordan and to ourselves, that 

 the few British species, included in these genera by Stainton, 

 Newman, Barrett and Meyrick, are really scattered representatives 

 of widely different groups having their central areas often in districts 

 quite outside the limits of the Palsearctic area. We feel quite satisfied, 

 therefore, with our results in this direction. 



There is, however, one point of difference between these authors 

 and ourselves which is most unsatisfactory. This is the difference 

 in the results arrived at in our attempts to grapple with the question 

 of generic nomenclature. Whilst they and we both claim to have 

 been guided by the strict law of priority in this matter, we have 

 arrived, in many cases, at totally different results, and, whilst we 

 are agreed for example that gallii, should be, by the strict law of 



