WORK IN EUROrE 
23 
dicta given forth by me, will give me pleasure, as showing progress 
in the cause of truth which I have always striven to serve. Of one 
peculiarity of my icork I feel certain: the best part of it is that 
which has assisted and stimulated the ivork of others , and I am 
conscious at the same time that that part of my work is the largest. 
This will, I trust, suffice to condone all the faults which I may 
have committed. I feel nevertheless impelled to introduce here, in 
extenuation of my shortcomings, a brief account of the difficulties 
I have had to contend with besides my absolute want of training as 
a professional zoologist, and my imperfect knowledge of the Eng¬ 
lish language. I have never had the good fortune to reside for any 
sufficient length of time in a place in which, or within a reasonable 
distance of which, there was a large dipterological collection. In 
St. Petersburg, in my time (that is, before 1856), there was no 
dipterological collection, public or private, to guide my first steps. 
The museum of the Academy of Sciences possessed a valuable but 
small set of Diptera labelled by Meigen, and that was all. In the 
United States, some remains of Say’s and Harris’s types were 
preserved in Boston; there was no collection either in Washington 
or in New York, the places in which I resided most of my time 
between 1856 and 1871. Thus it happened that my first mono¬ 
graph of the Tipulidae brevipalpi (1859) was based upon a collection 
formed, with very few exceptions, by myself. My further studies 
were supported by abundant and most liberal contributions from all 
sides, but for comparison and guidance I had nothing to rely upon 
but the hasty notes gathered in European museums during my 
temporary absences from America. Finally, in Heidelberg, where 
I settled after having left all my collections in the United States, 
and where I made the attempt to extend my studies to the Diptera 
of all the world, I had to rely for my instruction, in addition to the 
laborious and ungrateful study of a voluminous and generally unsat¬ 
isfactory literature, upon rather scanty materials which were only 
the very incomplete collection of European Diptera which I had ac¬ 
quired from Zeller, and the collections of exotic Diptera which, at 
different times, had been confided to me for the purpose of descrip¬ 
tion. For more information I had again to rely upon fugitive visits 
to distant museums (principally in London, Oxford, Berlin, and 
