1929] 
Present Trends in Systematic Entomology 
23 
publishing in Germany at a time when it was cut off from 
France . 1 As a result names he gave have been a bone of 
contention from the beginning. And from the beginning 
there has been a tendency to give the other party the benefit 
of the doubt, whenever there was any uncertainty of prio- 
rity of date. 
Now appears the third policy, Judgment. From this period 
of confusion and for a century more, most authors gave up 
hope of agreement on any authority, or of any certainty of 
priority, and merely used the name they thought most likely 
to be correctly understood by their readers. 
So much for the “trivial” name. 
Next is the genus ; in this case we have all the factors we 
have been displaying in the matter of the trivial name, af- 
fecting the name as a name ; and superposed on this we have 
a second, confusing factor. Besides nomenclature, we have 
classification. At first the genus name was merely the verna- 
cular (Latin) name, familiar to every one who read Latin. 
Every butterfly was Papilio, every moth, Phalaena. But even 
in Linnaeus’ time it seemed necessary to divide this mass, 
for instance to have a name by which we could tag all the 
“four-footed” butterflies; and there gradually came, with 
an emphasis on more and more abstruse characters a steady 
subdivision of the original genus. 
This raised the question : when you divide a genus, which 
part takes the old name, and which gets the new one? Here 
we have two choices, — or three. We may try in one way or 
another to find which the original author thought most 
characteristic of his name, and center our new group about 
that species (the type) , or we may leave it to the man who 
divides the genus to use his judgment. There is a third 
method, largely used, I believe by ichthyologists, but also 
by a few entomologists — to cut the Gordian Knot, and arbi- 
trarily choose the species the author happened to mention 
first. Some would qualify this choice in one way or another ; 
a few have applied it even where the author expressly says 
his first species is not typical, or where his first species, in 
contrast to others, violates his definition. 
!My friend Benjamin finds his “Tentamen” (issued in 1806) was 
used or referred to in practically every country but France. 
