Page:The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips.pdf/107

 Under these circumstances, it surely is not unreasonable to appeal to usage to preserve the current application of the name folii. Since 1872 no European entomologist has applied the name to anything but the Central European insect, except in a few cases of outright mis-determinations which were not confusions of nomenclature. It is the Central European insect which carries the name folii in the present paper.

The second oldest name applied to the present species is Fourcroy's Diplolepis quercus (1785), which was a binomial (acc. Rohwer and Fagan, 1917:365) created for Geoffroy's Diplolepis No. 1 (1762). The name quercus was never revived until Dalla Torre and Kieffer (1910) applied it to the Mediterranean variety of folii, probably because they discovered that Mayr had cited Geoffroy's Diplolepis No. 1 in the synonomy of that southern variety. According to the title page of the earliest edition of Geoffroy, that author drew his material from near Paris where, we now find, only the typical folii occurs. Geoffroy himself believed he had the true Linnean folii in his Diplolepis No. 1, as he indicated in the Supplement to a later edition of the Histoire des Insectes (1799, Vol. 2:721). It seems, then, that Fourcroy's quercus, which was Geoffroy's Diplolepis No. 1, was a synonym of folii, and I am returning to Mayr's pubescentis as the correct name of the agamic form of the southern variety flosculi.

Incidentally, the name flosculi (1868) for the bisexual form of this Mediterranean variety is older than the name pubescentis (1881) applied to the agamic form, and it is consequently the correct name for the variety, even tho most of us will find it convenient to continue to refer to the two forms by their particular names. This is one justification for the system of quadrinomials which I have employed in all of my papers for the alternating generations of Cynipidae.

In the synonomy of typical folii I have placed Oliver's scutellaris as Mayr placed it in 1881, and as practically all later authors have interpreted it. It would appear from the original publication of scutellaris that Oliver's material may have come from Manosque in Provence, an area which (acc. Cotte, 1912) has both the Central European and Mediterranean varieties of this species in it. We cannot, therefore, be more certain of Oliver's scutellaris than we are of Linnaeus' folii, but again, in the absence of type material, we seem justified in