32 LOEW’S RECEPTION OF MY FIRST WORK ON TIPULIDAE 
leisure, when he had nothing else to do; he would leave off for 
several days, or even weeks, so that a letter was only finished a 
month, or more, after it had been begun. Such letters were want¬ 
ing in genuineness; they had a note of strain in them by no means 
pleasant to his correspondent. The same prolixity occurs also in 
some of Loew’s publications. A conspicuous instance is the dia¬ 
tribe of Loew against Bigot, in the Berl. Ent. Zeit ., 1858, p. 841- 
346. The first four pages read like a prize essay on zoological 
classification, written by a scholar at the bidding of his teacher; 
the last page alone contains criticisms against Bigot. Loew knew 
very well that Bigot could not read German, and as this composition 
contains nothing of interest to anybody else, it is difficult to guess 
for what purpose it was written. The style is the heaviest German, 
and there is a sentence which begins about the middle of p. 341 
(“ Im ersten Fall,” etc.) and ends on the next page. Both this 
performance, and the calligraphic tour deforce which I have repro¬ 
duced, look like the outpourings of an excess of working-power, 
and savor of ostentation. 
Another specimen of the same prolixity, although in a less 
degree, appears in Loew’s Preface to the second edition of his 
“ Posener Dipteren ” (1840), which I have reproduced in the Berl. 
Ent. Zeit., 1896, p. 282. And the same failing may be noticed in 
the often too long descriptions of Loew’s new species, a failing 
which becomes intolerable in his “ Dipteren-Fauna Siidafrika’s ” 
(1860). The justification attempted by Loew in the Preface of this 
work (p. iv) is quite inadequate. The mere length of a description 
is not a merit, as any one will find who will try to determine African 
Diptera of the more difficult families from these bewildering de¬ 
scriptions. No wonder that Loew did not find a publisher for the 
second volume, which, according to the statement in the Preface 
(p. vi), was to follow soon after the first. 
II ON LOEW’S RECEPTION OF MY FIRST WORK ON TIPULIDAE 
It would seem natural that Loew should have taken some inter¬ 
est in the work of his (at that time) young correspondent, concern¬ 
ing a family of Diptera that he knew to be in a chaotic condition. 
