310 REVISION OF THE CICINDELID.E OF AUSTRALIA, 



importance of an aggregate of characters even of trifling value; 

 (3) the invariable failure of classifications founded on any single 

 character; (4) the quotation from Linnseus " that the characters 

 do not give the genus, but the genus gives the characters."* 



The Darwinian dictum that a classification founded on a single 

 character has always failed, and the Linnean aphorism that the 

 genus gives the characters not the characters the genus, form the 

 true foundations of taxonomy, }^et it is to be noticed that these 

 basic principles are often utterly neglected by systematists in 

 entomology. The following two hypotheses (not new) are also 

 deserving of careful consideration. (1) Any character with a 

 tendency to vary is likely to vary greatly, so that it may become 

 exaggerated, rudimentary, or may be quite lost in different allied 

 families, tribes, genera, or even in groups of species in large 

 genera. (2) Characters once lost are extremely unlikely to be 

 reacquired. 



The first of these hypotheses will justify us sometimes in treating 

 an organism which varies greatly from its nearest known allies in 

 some particular character as possibly an exceptional case; e.g., 

 the absence of pubescence on the body generally in Cicindela 

 tetragramma (and allied species) may not necessarily indicate 

 descent from a stem in which such pubescence was wanting. 

 The second hypothesis results from the belief that any character 

 which becomes lost does so from such fundamental inherent 

 tendencies of the organism that its reacquirement, at any rate in 

 such a highly developed order as the Coleoptera, would imply an 

 absence of continuity in the laws of development which seems at 

 variance with the orderly trend of such laws 



Till the year 1898 the classification of the Cicindelidre adopted 

 by Lacordaire in his " Genera" (1854) was that generally recog- 

 nised; but in 1898 Dr. Walther Horn formulated a new and 

 quite original system of classification. It will be useful to set 

 out these two systems. 



* Cf. ' Origin of Species ' (6th ed. Lond. 1878) pp.365-367. 



