21 
was almost absent. The ease with which phlaeas can be bred this way 
is remarkable, and some very nice forms can be got. 
NOTES ON THE AC1DAL1IN>E. 
(Read May 3rd, 1910, by LOUIS B. PROUT, F.E.S.) 
Classification is a dry subject, and, I dare say, most of my audience 
would tell me that what they already know of it—even if that be 
almost nil—is about co-extensive wuth what they would wish to know. 
My chief excuse for inflicting upon you a few notes which deal mainly 
with classificatory questions is that I w r as pressed to do something for 
the Society during the present session, and am so nearly tied down to 
matters of that kind by the scope of my present work, that I saw no 
prospect of my making excursions into more entertaining fields—I say 
that that was “ my chief excuse,” but I must plead guilty also to some 
feelings of anxiety that entomologists so enlightened and wide-awake 
in most ways as the members of our Society shall know something of 
the significance of such a well-known classificatory term as Acidaliinae 
and escape from the meshes of Guenee and “ South’s List,” or the 
deceptiveness of the popular name of “ Wave Moth.” I do not think 
it will do us any harm to recognize, for instance, what Herrich- 
Schaeffer recognized 60 or 70 years ago, that the “ Little White 
Wave” ( Astliena albulata, Hufn. = candidata, Schiff.) the “Welsh 
Wave” (Yenusia cambrica), etc., are not Acidaliids but Larentiids—or, 
in the vernacular, not “ w T aves ” but “ carpets,” while the “ mocha ” 
genus (Zonosoma in South’s List), which Guenee places as a separate 
family Ephyridae, has really a tolerably close relationship with the 
true “ waves.” 1 do not pretend that the time is ripe for an ideal 
re-classification, but I do contend that -when we are offered the 
choice between a comparatively natural system which was worked out 
almost completely by 1853 (when Lederer’s “ Die Spanner” appeared 
and a comparatively mmatural one which followed it in 1858 
(Guenee’s), we can hardly be accused of being ultra-Badical if we lean 
towards the former, or at least try to know something about it. 
Lederer divided the Qeometridae —or as Tutt would have us say, 
Geometrides —into four main groups, three of which seem eminently 
natural, while the fourth, though much more heterogeneous, is still 
natural in the sense that all its components have a character in 
common—the obsolescence of a particular vein of the hindwing— 
w’hich is not shared by representatives of any of the other three, so 
that one may perhaps venture to assume a phylogenetic connection. 
In any case, it is only just to Lederer to point out that we have not 
yet learned to classify this great fourth group on any really good 
structural characters, so that w^e cannot cast any stones at him even 
if we feel it is a much less satisfactory assemblage than either of the 
* The author alone is responsible for the nomenclature employed in this 
paper.—Ed. 
XX. 
