140 



THE BRITISH NATURALIST. 



[July 



despised Staudinger, the only thing that need be said, is that the 

 barbarity of A rgus, Bellargas, and Semiavgus, is not self-evident ; but of 

 course this is a question of taste. 



Mr. Dale then asserts that "another rule followed by the entomolo- 

 gists of the earlier part of the century, was that all names, in order to 

 stand, must be accompanied by an intelligible description written in 

 Latin." Mr. Dale does not say where he found this rule and it 

 probably exists only in his fertile imagination. The British Association 

 adopted a rule to the effect that only a name which has been associated 

 with the insect by an adequate description or figure can be allowed to 

 rank for priority, but nothing is said about the language to be used for 

 the description. 



The entomologists of the earlier part of the century did not follow 

 either this rule or that formulated by Mr. Dale, for they based their 

 nomenclature to a preponderating extent on the Vienna Catalogue, a 

 work in which there is not a word of Latin save for the generic and 

 trivial names, and which, in the case of the vast majority of the insects 

 with which it deals, contains no descriptions at atl. 



Moreover, even Mr. Dale himself, as will be presently shown, gives 

 his rule the go-by when, by so doing, he can get an opportunity 

 of a thrust at Staudinger. 



Mr. Dale next comes to that pet aversion of the Anti-Staudingerians, 

 Hufnagel, whose name he does not spell correctly, apparently con- 

 founding the Hufnagel of the Berlin Magazine with the Hcefnagel of a 

 century earlier, whose works are alluded to by Linnaeus. 



Mr. Dale evidently does not know Hufnagel's descriptions at first 

 hand and has apparently never heard of Von Rottemburg's expansions 

 of them. 



We next come to the Sinon-Podalirius question. ' Upon this, the 

 first thing to be said is that Mr. Dale misquotes Staudinger. It is 

 true that in the body of the Catalogue the synonymy stands as given 

 by Mr. Dale, but in the addenda and corrigenda at the end of the 

 volume, which Staudinger requests his readers carefully to consult, 

 and which Mr. Dale ought to have consulted, he corrects this to 

 Podalirms, L., S.N., X. 463 (adnot) which is exactly what Mr. Dale 

 says he ought to have done. 



Then Mr. Dale gets into a hopeless muddle. Having given 

 Podaliriiis, L. 1763, as a quotation from Staudinger, he goes on to say : 

 " It appears that Staudinger took it for granted that the name 

 Podalirius was given first in the 12th edition of the "Systema Naturse" 

 and was in such a hurry to upset the rule instituted by the British 

 Association that he neglected to look up the other editions." Mr. 

 Dale is in such a hurry to prove Staudinger wrong that, as we have 

 seen, he did not take the trouble to consult the appendix, and now 



