55 



•observations Dr. Leconte has chosen a motto out of G-oethe : Im 6 anzen-haltet eueh an 

 Worte ! The doctor advises Entomologists to disregard the advice of the devil given in 

 this motto. " Use words only to acquire and convey accurately your knowledge of things ; 

 but never believe that the word is superior to the thing which it represents. Thus will 

 you avoid (mere) scholasticism, one of the great abysses of thought into which the seeker 

 after truth is liable to fall." The doctor concludes his essay by the statement that descrip- 

 tive natural history is the lowest and most routine work that a man of science has to 

 perform, and that to aim at distinction by having one's name printed in connection with 

 a, weed, a bug or a bone is an ignoble ambition ; and this is certainly a sound view of the 

 case. In addition, if one's name happens to be a very common one the identity is addi- 

 tionally obscured when the name appears after a Latin title of a species. To resume our 

 review of the older authors : Fabricius (1775) was the first to describe the " Royal 

 Walnut Moth," probably our finest spinner. One or two of his descriptions have not 

 been identified, such as his Bombyx Americana, Pyralis Lactana, Tinea Sepulcrella ; 

 and this is the case also with Linne's Phalcena Omicron. 



The next work of importance to the American student is that of Cramer, a Dutch 

 Entomologist whose volumes (1779 to 1782) contain a great quantity of coloured figures 

 without any systematic arrangement and for the most part coarsely executed. Cramer 

 figures and names for the first time several of our Hawk Moths, such as the species of 

 the genus Everyx, Choerilus and Myron, the larvae of which feed on azaleas, grapevines 

 and the Virginia Creeper. Both Cramer and Drury figure our .North American species 

 only incidentally, with other so-called exotic material. But in 1779 appeared the large 

 folio work in two volumes by Abbot and Smith exclusively on the Lepidoptera of Georgia, 

 which geographical name then covered a larger area of North America than at present. 

 The materials for this work were the collections, coloured drawings and observations of 

 Abbot, an English schoolmaster residing in Georgia, and thus the South became histori- 

 cally the scene of the earliest studies of our butterflies and moths. Afterwards Major 

 Leconte continued Abbot's work in the same field, publishing upon the butterflies 

 together with the French Lepidopterist, Dr. Boisduval. Abbot's original drawings, which 

 I have had the opportunity of examining in the British Museum, are much better than 

 the published plates, which nevertheless are superior to anything issued before that time, 

 if we except certain figures by Dutch Entomologists of European species. Abbot gives us 

 the species in the three stages of caterpillar, chrysalis and perfect insect, together with the 

 food plant. The text, in English and French, is, however, totally, or almost valueless, if 

 intended to supplement the drawings and render the identification of the species certain. 

 Some of the species cannot yet be satisfactorily made out, while it seems probable that in 

 two instances, Catocala amasia and Homoptera calyeanthata, Abbot has given two dis- 

 tinct species as the sexes of one and the same form. In 1874 I rediscovered the Phalcena 

 Chionanthi of Abbot and Smith, in a collection of Noctuidse sent me from Ithaca, N. Y., 

 by Professor Comstock, of Cornell University. This species had not been even again 

 alluded to in print, so far as I was able to ascertain, since 1797, a long space of time, 

 and had I been less familiar with the literature of our moths I should have fallen into 

 the error of redescribing it. The Phalcena Chionanthi of Abbot and Smith is now the 

 Adita Chionanthi of our lists ; the moth being one of the Noctuidos and affording a new 

 generic type allied to the genus Agrotis. Abbot's unpublished drawings contain repre- 

 sentations of several species subsequently described, and were probably not issued because 

 only the perfect stages are represented. Among these drawings is one of the rare 

 Citheronia sepulcralis, Grote and Robinson, our second species congeneric with the Royal 

 Walnut Moth collected plentifully by Mr. Koebele in Florida. The species of Abbot's, 

 which I have not been able satisfactorily to identify, are Aceris, Hastulifera and Caly- 

 eanthata among the Noctuidce, while I originally showed that his Vidua is not the species 

 described afterwards by Guenee under this name, altered to Yiduata in the supplement 

 to the last volume on the JVoctuidos in the "Species General." I will here state that I 

 am of opinion that we should reject the name of Viduata, altogether, because this is only 

 a slight alteration of Abbot's name and is intended to apply to Abbot's species by Guenee. 

 Now, in my original essay I showed that Guenee's species was not Abbot's but Desperata, 

 very probably. Accepting this we must use a new name for Vidua and Viduata of 



