PHYLOGENETIC HISTORY 
Analyses of the phylogenetic history of any group of 
organisms and biologic interpretations of taxonomic data 
depend for their validity upon the soundness of the available 
classifications of the group. If the catalogs are poorly made, 
one may draw no conclusions or, what is worse, draw con- 
clusions as fantastic as the hobgoblins of primitive imagina- 
tion. But if the taxonomic arrangement brings together 
species of common ancestry and accurately portrays the vary- 
ing degrees of relationship between those species, a classifica- 
tion becomes one of the most powerful tools available for the 
evolutionary interpretation of biologic phenomena. It be- 
comes a code by which one may translate the biologic and 
distributional data into the story of the origin and paths of 
dispersion and the order of development of each species and 
of each biologic characteristic of a group, from its primitive 
beginnings and thru the several stages by which it evolved 
the peculiar phenomena which we find today. 
Phylogenetic interpretations of the genus Cynips have here- 
tofore been impossible because cynipid genera, in common 
with the genera of many other insects, have been established 
for the most part upon “diagnostic” characters of insect 
morphology. These have been drawn from the toothed tarsal 
claw, the dorsally produced and naked abdomen, and the hairy 
thorax of the agamic form of the species folii, the genotype of 
the group (see Mayr 1870-1905, Dalla Torre and Kieffer 1910, 
Beutenmiiller 1911, and Weld 1922-26, where the names 
Dryophanta or Diplolepis are used instead of Cynips). The 
insects included in the genus thus defined differed in many 
points of structure which, however, were consistently ignored. 
The genus included both black oak and white oak species, 
species that live in galls on flowers, leaves, stems, and roots, 
and galls of every conceivable type of structure (e.g., see 
plates 12 to 17 in Beutenmuller 1911). There were species 
with divergent types of life histories. There were species 
that we shall ultimately have to assign to 8 or 10 distinct and 
largely unrelated genera. The extent to which our own in- 
terpretation differs from previous treatments becomes evident 
in the following table. 
( 61 ) 
