108 
Psyche 
[June 
Even though the day should come when scientific refine- 
ment would make the determination of our commonest in- 
sect, in a technical sense, impossible to any but the specialist, 
house fly will be an excellent name to indicate that trouble- 
some aggregate of dipterous insects that may or may not 
spread typhoid by walking on the butter. 
For a time there was a tendency to foist upon the layman 
a modification of the technical name, as the Calosoma beetle, 
brown Anomala, and apple Bucculatrix. An excellent prece- 
dent was established for this procedure by the common 
names applied to many plants, as Geranium, Aster, Verbena, 
Petunia, Alyssum and many more. But botany is a much 
older science than entomology and I wonder if in many cases 
the taxonomic botanist, or herbalist, as he was then called, 
did not latinize the vernacular names rather than the lay- 
man adopt the technical terms. Be that as it may, we have 
not been nearly so successful with insect names of this type. 
Then there were the “gay nineties” of geographical names, 
New York weevil, San Jose scale, Mexican bean beetle, and 
what not, until a nation’s ire was raised because it was being 
held responsible for so many “wee tim’rous beasties.” 
Descriptive names are ideal, but lead us into some very 
ridiculous complications. We have the brown horse louse. 
Is it a brown louse or a louse on brown horses? And even 
worse, the biting horse louse. Here exidently the louse in- 
fests biting horses. So we must change it around to the 
horse biting louse. Now we must be careful of the accent, 
for it we say horse-biting louse we can see this louse cavort- 
ing over the pasture snapping at the horses. We must pro- 
nounce it horse biting-louse. And there are the black cabbage 
beetle, green apple aphid and countless others. 
“What should be the structure of a common name?” 
This was a question that concerned the Association for many 
years. Committees profoundly considered the academic use 
of the hyphen, of ed, and of ous, and delved into Shakespeare 
and Chaucer until the codification of common names was 
more involved than the most intricate mental gyrations of 
the International Commission. But the economic entomolo- 
gist has a sense of humor and when the balloon got so large 
that it threatened to blot out the sun, he touched it with a 
