TN a paper recently published in the Proc. of the U.S. National Museum, -*■ vol. 77, Art. 17, Mr. W. Dwight Pierce classifies the North American Anthribidae under the name of Platystomidae (Mr. Pierce makes the family a superfamily, which does not affect the nomenclatural question) and states that the name Anthribidae has to be transferred to the family hitherto called Nitidulidae. If Mr. Pierce were right, Meligeihes would become an Anthribid and Araecerus a Platystomid. Is this upsetting of

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... menclature justified by the evidence and arguments Mi-. W. D. Pierce brings forward \ The reproach has been addressed to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature that the Commissioners, in rendering an opinion, depend too much on the evidence presented by the person who brings a case before the Commission, the evidence being sometimes incomplete or even inaccurate ; a serious censure. In order to be as much as possible on the safe side, the Commission has adopted the practice of submitting any special question to the authors working at the particular group in which the case has arisen. If Mr. W. D. Pierce had followed this sound procedure, he would have been saved from falling into the error of basing his conclusions on an incomplete and partly inaccurate statement of the case and from arriving at a result not warranted by Rules of Nomenclature and common sense. I am, of course, writing this protest as a Coleopterist interested in Anthribidae, not as a member of the Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. When I took up this family of rhynchophorous beetles as a side-line in 1893, I accepted the family name Anthribidae because the authors who had dealt with the family on a broad basis had adopted that name : Schoenherr, Jekel, Pascoe, Lacordaire, etc. I confess that I was wrong in neglecting to inquire into the history of the name more closely, and therefore feel grateful to Mr. W. D. Pierce for the opportunity he gives me to examine with him the past history of the name Anthribus from which the designation Anthribidae is derived. Let us then look at Mi-. W. D. Pierce's statements