AN ENTOMOLOGICAL MUDDLE: A REVIEW

Extract

I fear that any one reading the various papers which have appeared during the past year on the Cunea–Congrua–Antigone–Textor controversy would not be very greatly impressed with the lucidity of entomologists. This controversy illustrates remarkably well the difficulty of carrying on a discussion about species or forms whose status is disputed without rendering confusion worse confounded, for the simple reason that different persons use the same name in different senses. For instance, when Dr. Fyles writes of cunea, Drury, he does not mean the insect which Drs. Smith and Dyar understand by the same name, the moth which Harris called the many-spotted ermine moth of the South, Phalæna punctatissima, A. & S., but the individual moth whicir served as Drury's type and which he chooses to believe did not belong to the genus Hyphantria at all, but to have been a Spilosoma, and from this springs much of the misunderstanding which has arisen between these gentlemen.