THE ENTOMOLOGISTS 
WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
No. 251.] SATUEDAY, JULY 27, 1861. [Price 
MISPRINTS. 
Shouxd misprints be perpetuated? At 
one time we should have answered this 
question in the affirmative, and in our 
volume of the ‘ Insecta Britannica,’ at 
p. 294, we read “ Frangutella.” Now 
we all know that “ Frangutella ” was 
a misprint for Frangulella, the insect 
being named after the plant Rhamnus 
Frangula, but we then held that the 
misprint could not be corrected! 
Now, suppose Goeze’s printer had 
set it up Frangutella,, should we have 
maintained that the name ought always 
to have been afterwards written with 
the letter t topsy-turvy? Clearly such 
an absurdity could not have been 
maintained. 
Or suppose the word had been mis- 
! spelt Frnngrlella, should we have in- 
j sisted on pronouncing that word, which 
to those not educated in Wales would 
have been rather difficult? We think 
not? 
Clearly, then, there are misprints so 
glaring that it is perfectly natural to 
correct them, and “ Frangutella,^’' we 
'are of opinion, may with perfect pro- 
priety be now written Frangulella. If 
the law of priority were indeed so 
rigid that no name, however misspelt, 
could be corrected, we might have 
had names unpronounceable, and names 
with inverted letters. The law must 
therefore be interpreted reasonably, and 
that degree of latitude will, we imagine, 
admit of the correction of words- which 
are manifestly misspelt. 
In the ‘ Manual,’ vol. ii. p. 428, we 
corrected the spelling to Frangulella, 
but we did not at that time assign 
any reason for the change in the ortho- 
graphy. 
Now that we are at work on a 
volume of the ‘Natural History of the 
Tineina,’ which will treat of the genus 
Bucculatrix, we thought it desirable 
to place thus publicly on record our 
altered views on the subject of the 
perpetuation of misprints. 
Whether such a misprint as Alni 
for Ulmi is admissable for correction 
(see last number, p. 127), is a point 
on which we will not at present ex- 
press an opinion. The correction of 
each individual misprint must stand 
upon its own merits, and we can lay 
down no invariable rule that will apply 
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