15 



The Species of North American Hawk Moths. 



1 he Authors who have written extendedly upon the 



North American Hawk Moths, or Sph hut nine, are Harris 

 (1839), Walker (1856), Clemens (1859), Grote und Robinson 

 (1865), Boisduval (1874), Butler (1876), Grote (1877) and 

 Fernald (1886). Of these Walker, Boisduval and Butler 

 have described our species in connection with those from 

 other parts of the world. Since 1865 groups (sub-families 

 or tribes) have been recognised, although these were more 

 or less distinctly indicated and in part named by older 

 Authors, in particular by Hubner. Unidentified descriptions 

 are discussed by me in Papilio, 2, 170. 



In the present work*) I have gone over my notes and 

 earlier papers on the family, maintaining my sequence of 

 the genera, which had been in the main recognised by 

 Butler. My manuscript was intended as a chapter of an 

 extended work on North American Moths, which awaited a 

 publisher, when the appearance of Professor Fernald's pam- 

 phlet upon the "Sphingidae of New England", induced me 

 first to send my list of the species to the "Canadian Ento- 

 mologist" for publication and then to revise the descriptional 



*) I refer the student to my monograph of the Sphingidae of Cuba 

 published by the Entomological Society of Philadelphia, August, 1865. 

 Extra copies of this (with the Plates colored and my family crest on the 

 title page) are now very rare. This paper, written in my twenty third 

 year, was followed by a Synonymical Catalogue of North American Sphiu- 

 gidae, including Mexican and West Indian species and a Plate, by my- 

 self and Mr. C. T. Robinson, in which the synonymy of our species (which 

 had been mainly taken by Clemens from the British Museum Lists) was 

 originally investigated. Also to papers in the Lyceum Annals, New York; 

 and, later, in the Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences. 



