A commonly encountered problem of ignoring or inattentive reading of scientific articles by some protistologists of the past and present has been revealed using the case study of taxonomy of the ciliate genus Frontonia. The comparison between materials from literature and own investigations allowed the author to conclude that F. vernalis Ehrenberg, 1833 cannot to be a valid species and assume that it is rather a cluster of closely related freshwater ciliates with one contractile vacuole and a stable ability to accommodate green algae as the cytoplasmic symbionts. “F. vernalis”, as described by Bullington (1939), was shown to have little in common with the original description by Ehrenberg and most likely is a brackishwater ciliate similar to F. fusca. F. oculiaris described by the same author (Bullington, 1939) is obviously F. fusca, and the name “F. oculiaris” should be considered as a younger synonym of the latter. Thus, redescription of F. oculiaris (Pan et al., 2013b) should be treated just as a morpholog