INTRODUCTION. 

Tuis treatise on the Tineina of Central America, although it bears my name, is 
the combined work of three specialists, of whom the other two have assuredly 
borne a greater burden of critical labour than myself. Had it not been for the 
conscientious zeal and ability with which they have applied themselves to the task 
of coordinating the structural characters on which the classification here adopted 
has been based, the prospect of imparting full scientific value to this part of the 
‘Biologia’ would have been remote. In thanking Mr. August Busck for the 
invaluable assistance he has rendered, J must not omit also my acknowledgments to 
Dr. O. Howard, Chief of the Bureau of Entomology, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 
Washington, who was good enough to grant the necessary permission and to spare his 
services for some months for this purpose. I regard this as another proof of that 
open-minded liberality which I have personally found to be an almost invariable 
attribute of American men of Science. 
I can only hope that the study of much accumulated material to which he 
could not have access in the United States, and especially the examination of the 
types of many important genera in my collections, may have afforded Mr. Busck 
some slight return for his labour and for having given me the advantage of that 
very special knowledge of the North American fauna which he alone could bring to 
bear upon my task. I had written the majority of the descriptions of species 
several years ago, many of them during absences from home without access to books 
or collections ; consequently but few had been placed with certainty in their proper 
genera until my assistant, Mr. J. Hartley Durrant, was able to examine and arrange 
them. When the more serious work was commenced, it became at once apparent that 
the lines of classification hitherto adopted, whether in Europe or America, were too 
involved and incomplete to be safely relied upon in dealing with a fauna practically 
unknown in relation to this special group of the Lepidoptera, and it was decided to 
correlate the various systems and to revise the limits of hitherto-accepted family- 
divisions, continuing the work already done for me by Mr. Durrant in connection with 
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