No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2012
In 1806, Hübner, as we have seen, printed for his own use and in order that it might be submitted to certain competent persons, to be examined and judged of, the sketch of a plan for the arrangement of the Lepidoptera, called the Tentamen, &c.; and this sketch “was afterwards enlargcd and publishcd as the verzcichniss bekannter schmetterlinge,” as stated by Geyer, Thon's Archir, vol. 1, p. 28, 1827.
* Note.—The language used by Hubner throughout this volume is uncouth and that of an unlettered man, a condition not at all incompatible with skill in delineating and coloring. Consequently, While his plates are models of excellence, his text is boorish. To him, fore wings are pinions, schwingen; hind wirrgs sinkers, senken; the fore legs arms, aerme; the antennæ ears, ohren; the proboscis a two snouted nose, zweischnaubigen nase, &c. One of the coitus of the Astyci is thus characterized: “The wings spotted with white like a sausage,” which is Hubnerian for mottled. Dr. Hagen, to whom I applied for light respecting certain words, writes thus: “Hubner was illiterate. His language cannot be called in any sense plain German. He invented a number of words for things and parts for which words existed long ago in German, and were used and adopted fifty or even a hundred years before Hubner. Apparently he had no knowledge of these words or of the works in which they were used. The consequence is that neither science nor even any popular writer has adopted Hubner's words. They are known to nobody, and for some of them the sense can only be guessed. you will find them in no German dictionary. They are simply self-made barbarisms.” Geyer, Thon's Archiv., 1827, in his notice of Hubner and his works, calls his language “illiterate (schwunglose sprache), greatly marred by self-made words.”
* What good result was possible when such an author attempted to classify all the species of the several divisions of the great order Lepidoptera, never having seen more than a small fraction of the insects themselves and knowing nothing of the remainder except through loose descriptions and from plates like those of Herbst and Esper and Cramer, in which the superficies only is represented and that coarsely and with no heed to exactness. Many of the figures on these plates cannot even now be identified, and are believed to represent insects which have no existence in nature, perhaps manufactured articles sold to confiding collectors by cunning dealers. Treitschke initimates that the dealers palmed on the author of the Verzeichniss varieties for species, and common exoctics as rare indigenous. Hubner's contemporaries understood his capabilities and were fully equal to judging correctly his system, and accordingly the Verzeichniss was quietly ignored, and except through his plates, this author exercised no influence on that generation.
* The laws of priority are not inexorable, and such laws any where lead only to absurdity and injustice. The author of the Hist. Sketch nowhere hesitates to decide what names of genera are entitled to credit and what are not, and rejects such as he pleases with no regard to the “inexorable” laws. In the Rules of the Brit. Ass'n, the 11th Rule says, “a name may be changed when it implics a false proposition,” &c., the systematist of course being judge. And in the notes on this, structures,” &c. Usage condemns profane and blackguard names. The laws of priority, like all human laws, are to be applied with a few grains of common sese; that is all.
* Thus the coitus Hesperia is one of the Napaeae, as is also coitus Lycaena. Hubner proceeded in all respects as if he were the first and only systematist who had treated of the Lepidoptera.