98 
Psyche 
[September 
CYATHOMYRMEX, A NEW NAME FOR THE 
SUBGENUS CYATHOCEPHALUS EMERY. 
By William Steel Creighton, 
Dept, of Biology, College of the City of New York. 
The purpose of this note is to call attention to the ex- 
istence of a synonym in the case of the generic name 
Cyathocephalus. This name was first used by the helmin- 
thologist Kessler in 1868 and repeated as the name of a sub- 
genus of ants by Emery in 1915. With several excellent 
compilations of generic names at the disposal of the tax- 
onomists it is surprising that the repetition has escaped 
detection for a period of almost eighteen years. The history 
of this synonym is instructive since it is a perfect example 
of the evils arising from what may be called a buried sub- 
genus. It is obvious that the task imposed upon the com- 
pilers of generic and subgeneric lists is yearly growing 
more onerous. In justice to the men who have undertaken 
this herculean labor as well as for the sake of their own 
subject taxonomists should bend every effort to make the 
names of new subgenera as prominent as position and 
typography will permit. The present case demonstrates 
how easily confusion can arise when this practice is not 
followed. 
In 1868 Kessler erected the genus Cyathocephalus to in- 
clude a single species of a Cestode worm previously 
described by Pallas (1781) under the specific name trun- 
catus. Kessler's work appeared in Russian in the Proceed- 
ings of the Russian Naturalists Society of St. Petersburg. 
Because of linguistic difficulties or, as seems more probable, 
because of the great rarity of the early issues of this 
periodical Kessler’s description did not come to the atten- 
tion of the compilators for a number of years. The first 
standard compilation to list the genus Cyathocephalus seems 
to have been Bronn’s Klassen und Ordnungen des Tier 
Reichs. In 1894 this publication carried a reference to a 
paper by Brauns in which the genus was mentioned. Four 
