Page:The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips.pdf/86

 More unfortunate than this use of several terms for our present genus has been the European application of the term Cynips, ever since Mayr's publications, to a totally different genus which Rohwer and Fagan have re-named Adleria. It is to be regretted that our International Rules do not allow us to recognize this usage, but as long as we operate under the rules, we should apply Cynips to the phylogenetic unit which includes the species folii, and which, therefore, is strictly synonymous with Förster's Dryophanta.

The taxonomic concept of our present genus has only slowly emerged from this nomenclatorial confusion, altho in the brilliant revision of the Cynipidae by Hartig in 1840 all of the then-known (5) European species that we now recognize in this genus were brought together as numbers 2 to 6 of the Cynips there defined. The unity of the present group was further emphasized in 1881 by Mayr and we have already shown that 88 per cent of Mayr's inclusions are still acceptable. No later author has, in our judgment, had more than 48 per cent of his inclusions warranted phylogenetically (see page 62).

This widespread confusion in the interpretation of Cynips has not been wholly consequent on the difficulty of interpreting the relatively uniform structures of gall wasp species. Felt (Journ. Econ. Ent. 19:672) considers the situation due to the complex life cycle of our insects and to the failure of a sufficient number of economic entomologists to turn to cynipid taxonomy as an avocation. It is our own judgment that the poor work is the result of using book descriptions and “diagnostic characters” convenient for the manufacture of “Keys,” instead of actual specimens and adequate series of the species involved. The current chaos in the interpretation of cynipid genera dates from the publication, in 1893, of the cynipid volume of the Catalogus Hymenopterorum by C. C. de Dalla Torre, a painstaking bibliographer, but a systematist with a naïve faith in published descriptions and a supreme interest in the convenience of a classification. Later treatments of Cynips have uncritically accepted the Dalla Torre Catalog. If I depart from this tradition, it is because I believe that the study of thousands of individuals, representing all of the species of a group, are a sounder basis for phylogenetic interpretations than a catalog made by a