Abstract
I SHALL be glad if you will afford me an opportunity of explaining one or two personal matters referred to in p. 11 of Mr. Scudder's memoir on the Devonian Insects of New Brunswick, which was mentioned in your last number (pp. 483, 4). He very justly takes exception to some bibliographical and orthographical errors committed by me in Trans. Entom. Soc. Lond. 1871, pp. 38–40, in a notice of fossil insects named and described by him, and naturally regards them as evidence of insufficient study of the literature relating to them. It is difficult to say precisely what happened upwards of ten years ago, but I am satisfied that the mistakes must have arisen in one or the other of these two ways. Either I attributed the authorship of the names to the person who first published figures of the fossils, on the ground that names bestowed upon insect-fossils by the publication of descriptions, without accompanying figures, rank as mere “Catalogue” or MS. names devoid of priority; or else they are due to circumstances under which the citations were collated. Closely pressed for time, and without much experience in the art of citation, it is as likely as not that, after forming an opinion upon the plates and consulting the letterpress to see what the author had to say about them, I referred from force of habit to the title-page of the volume for the date of publication and the author's name, instead of turning to the heading of the article for this last.
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EATON, A. The Oldest Fossil Insects. Nature 23, 507 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/023507a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/023507a0
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