I A REVIEW OF THE NORTH AMERICAN BEMBIDIIN^. 



In almost every considerable collection of the Insecta, there are 

 usually many unworked sections consisting principally of uniden- 

 tified material. This is especially true of those accumulated by 

 students not having with them assistants to perform the more 

 mechanical work relating to mounting and cleaning specimens and 

 restoring such as may deteriorate through unfavorable conditions 

 in the lapse of time. Among the unstudied sections of the writer's 

 collection, none have been more discomforting than those com- 

 prising some subfamilies of the Carabidae, and the material at hand, 

 though very extensive, has been thus far only partially identified 

 and so comparatively useless. It was therefore with the idea of 

 bringing some order out of chaos that the revisions of the present 

 volume were drawn up, not however without many misgivings as 

 to the attitude to be assumed by those having different conceptions 

 regarding what should or should not be called species. These dif- 

 ferences of view will continue, however, so long as our knowledge 

 remains imperfect. 



Subfamily BEMBIDIINvE. 



This large and clearly circumscribed Carabid complex has never 

 been the subject of much attentive systematic study in this country, 

 the only monographic treatment attempted thus far being the 

 essays on Bembidion and Tachys published by Mr. Roland Hay- 

 ward (Tr. Am. Ent. Soc., 1897, p. 32 and 1. c., 1900, p. 191). In 

 these papers Mr. Haywood records as valid 188 species, and adding 

 to these about a dozen more, either unadmitted among those al- 

 ready published, or subsequently described as' new, our known 

 species at the time of that author's investigations amounted to 

 about 200. A few have been since published by Fall and Blaisdell. 

 I have made the collecting of material in this subfamily a special 

 object during many years, thoroughly searching through debris 

 along water courses and in the moist mosses of numerous ravines, 

 especially in the Pacific coast regions, and have added besides a 

 considerable number of species taken by Prof. Wickham during his 

 T. L. Casey, Mem. Col. VIII, Oct. 1918. 



