1929] 
Present Trends in Systematic Entomology 
25 
had their groups of animals and plants, Entoma and the 
rest. Where our recent history of genera and species has 
been a war of policies and codes, the group names till very 
recently have been nearly free from all this. Practically our 
present code only requires two things, (1) if the group name 
is based on a genus, it must be a genus-name recognized as 
valid by the writer; (2) it must not be a homonym. Outside 
of this we have merely the policy of “judgment” formerly in 
use for all names, and still in use for morphological nomen- 
clature and the like. 
Just before the war began a movement to bring these 
group names also under a strict law of priority. It was spon- 
sored in the fields best known to me by people who had a 
unique code somewhat different from the official one, and 
resulted in some weird changes as they applied it. This first 
attempt was to require that the name of each family must 
be based on the oldest genus-name in it, regardless of 
whether that name had ever been used as the basis of a 
group-name before. 
Another worker has (for family names) considered those 
names which end in the present conventional ending for 
family names (-idae) , and applied the law of priority strictly 
on that basis. Others give priority to the oldest group- 
names involved, regardless of its exact form, and modify it 
to the conventional present-day form for the category 
concerned. 
Most recently there has appeared a group who wish to 
extend the “type” principle to these group names, and have 
a certain species (or genus) chosen as type of each higher 
group, which shall always be in the group. In this case if 
the type genus changes its name the family will also change 
to the corresponding name. 
An example: Our Ctenucha virginica belongs to a certain 
family, long known as the Syntomidce. The genus Syntomis 
is a synonym of Amata, so (unless the present hopelessly 
slow conservanda mechanism comes into play), we must 
abandon Syntomidse even under the present brief provisions 
of the code. The type of the Syntomidse may be considered 
Syntomis phegea , the type of Syntomis as generally used, now 
become Amata phegea. Shall then the name of the new family 
