i8 93 .] THE BRITISH NATURALIST. 141 



appears to have forgotten the date of the 12th edition, which is 1767 

 and not 1763. The work, to which Staudinger is here alluding, is the 

 Museum Ludovicae Ulricae, which, as it happens, is the first work >in 

 which Linnaeus describes Podalirius. Now, if Mr. Dale be consistent, he 

 ought to reject the 10th edition of the " Systema " as an authority on 

 this species because it does not contain a description of it. The species 

 is not included in the text at all but in a footnote on page 463 is a 

 statement that many hold podalirius and protesilaus to be synonymous 

 — so that after all, Poda in 1761, was the first to describe the insect. 



Mr. Dale next plunges into the question is hyale, L. our hyale or 

 edusa. He gives correctly the diagnosis of hyale from the 12th edition, 

 if, however, he had consulted the description in the " Fauna Suecica," 

 he would have found something pertinent to the solution of the 

 question. He states that the references given by Linnaeus are all to 

 figures of edusa, and at once concludes that he has settled the question. 



Here, in passing, we must note the extraordinary error he makes in 

 giving edusa, Fab. 1776, as having anything to do with the insect we 

 know by that name. This error is inexcusable if it be the fact as stated 

 by Mr. Robson in the "Young Naturalist " for 1888, p. 86, that Mr. Dale 

 has a copy of the ' Genera Insectorum,' and can only be due to the fact 

 that Mr. Dale has never taken the trouble to study the description given 

 in that work of the insect therein named edusa ; had he done so, he 

 would have recognised that it is a description not of the insect we know 

 as edusa, but, as Fabricius himself states in his next published work, the 

 ' Species Insectorum' 1781, oidaplidice. It results, therefore, that unless 

 hyale, Linn ,=edusa, Fab., the earliest name for the latter insect, " as- 

 sociated with an intelligible description in Latin " is Croceus, Fourcroy, 

 1785, as stated by Kirby. 



But is hyale, "L.=edusa, Fab. Mr. Dale correctly states that Esper 

 thought so, and probably Borkhausen (1788) and Schneider, who gener- 

 ally follow Esper, did so in this case.* Mr. Dale states correctly that 

 Hubner in his plates figures our hyale under the name of palccno and 

 our edusa under the name of hyale, but apparently he does not know 

 that in his text published in 1805, Hubner corrects this nomenclature 

 and gives the name hyale to the insect he had figured as palamo, and 

 edusa to the insect he had figured as hyale ; nor does he show any 

 acquaintance with the statements of Donovan in his 7th Volume, 

 published in 1798, that the insect in the Linnaean Cabinet (then in the 

 possession of Dr. Smith) labelled hyale was undoubtedly the insect we 

 know by that name. If this statement be accurate it would appear to 

 settle the question, as it is hardly likely that at that early date the 

 Linnaean collection would have been tampered with, as it is said to 

 have been more recently. 



* Borkhausen, however, corrects himself in the following year, and adopts hyale for 



the insect we know by that name. 



