Beetles 249 



the specialists have been driven to turn their microscopes on the most obscure 

 and insignificant parts of the body, and to take cognizance of the slightest 

 appreciable constant differences. The real way in which an entomologist 

 gets his beetles classified is to submit specimens to a specialist for determina- 

 tion. Then as his authoritatively determined collection gradually increases, 

 the collector begins to get acquainted with certain well-marked species, and 

 also with the general appearance or habitus of the members of any one family. 

 He becomes in time able to classify his new specimens to families, not by 

 tables or keys but by general appearance and a certain few characteristic 

 structural peculiarities, and to determine some species by comparison with 

 the already classified specimens in his collection. The eye thus gradually 

 trained becomes more and more discriminating, and the collector may in 

 time come to be a recognized " coleopterist " both by virtue of his large col- 

 lection and the rare forms it contains and by his wide personal ac- 

 quaintanceship with beetle species. In the necessarily limited account of 

 the Coleoptera given in the following pages I purpose to give keys only to 

 tribes and families, and, in order to make even these simple enough to be 

 useful, to leave most of the small, rare, and obscure families wholly out of 

 consideration. 



The tables thus freed of over half the families of the order still include 

 five-sixths of all the North American beetle kinds, and will be found to include 

 nine out of every ten beetle species collected. That is, the great proportion, 

 ninety per cent, probably, of species at all common enough to be collected 

 belong to less than half of the recognized families. These more familiar 

 families can also be grouped into a few tribes, each having some simple 

 common structural characteristic, thus still further aiding in the work of the 

 classifier. The collector will thus first classify his specimen to a tribe by 

 means of the table on page 251, and then turning to a discussion of that 

 particular tribe find a key to its families.* In the discussion of each of 

 these will be found accounts of the life of certain of the more abundant, wide- 

 spread, and interesting species of the family. 



The characteristics of the order as a whole are obvious and familiar: 

 most beetles are readily known for beetles, and but few insects of other orders 

 get mistaken for them. The "black beetle" of the house is a cockroach, 

 and several of the hard-bodied, blackish sucking-bugs are sometimes mis- 

 takenly called beetles, as are also the earwigs. But the horny fore wings, 

 elytra, serving as a sheath for the large membranous hind wings, the true 



* If the collector wishes a further determination of his specimens, he must do as prac- 

 tically all other amateur and most professional entomologists do; that is, send his 

 material to a specialist, who has, by the way, the right recognized by custom of keeping 

 any of these specimens sent him, to add to his own cabinets. It is well, therefore, to 

 send an extra specimen to return in the case of any species likely to interest him. 



