26 
Psyche 
[March 
by Distant in his Monograph of Oriental Cicadidae (1892) 
and Dr. Myers of course could not avoid the pitfall. I know 
that chu ki is Lycorma but I had not associated chu ki with 
Huechys until I read Myers’ book (p. 22), although I have 
always tried to identify Huechys in Chinese ever since I 
learned from Distant that this insect is employed by the 
Chinese as a drug. Now it is clear that Huechys is a direct 
romanization of the Chinese term chu ki. 
There are several ways to prove that chu ki is L. delicatula 
and not Huechys sanguined. “Ki” means a “fowl” and the 
general form of a Lycorma resembles a fowl while the form 
of a Huechys does not. On the other hand, Huechys is a 
southern species, and becomes rare as we approach the 
Yangtze valley. Among the large number of specimens col- 
lected, I have only a single specimen from Wuchang and an- 
other one from Ichang (two new records for this species) 
while all the old specimens in the Harvard collection came 
from south China. The case with Lycorma seems to be just 
reverse. Although delicatula is known as far south as India, 
it is not so common in the south as in the north, although 
the south has its own species. Now all the writers of the 
Chinese Pen Ts’ao were people from the north. It seems to 
be more reasonable to assume that the insect in question is 
a northern species instead of a southern one. But the best 
proof is found in the description of chu ki as it was given by 
various medical men and for this I submit the following 
translation. 
“These insects are very common in Honan. They look 
like a moth but with the abdomen larger and the head and 
the legs blackish. There are two pairs of wings, the outer 
pair (tegmina) is grey while the inner pair (wings) is deep 
red, decorated with all five colors” — from Pen Ts’ao Yen Yi 
by Kio Chung Pi (1111-1116) . 1 
“The chu are the ill-smelling Ailanthus trees. The outer 
wings of the insects (chu ki) are greyish yellow while the 
inner ones are decorated with all five colors. They generally 
line up on the tree and by the late fall, deposit their eggs on 
the bark. The nymph has six legs, with wings (?) doubled 
and black and the head depressed and truncated in front.” — 
From Pen Ts’ao Kang Mu by Li Shih Chen (1578). 
3 This is the period with which the name of the author is connected. 
