LOEW S WORK ON AMBER DIPTERA 
63 
IX ON LOEW’S WORK ON AMBER DIPTERA IN GENERAL, AND 
ON THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ITS ULTIMATE FAILURE 
This chapter is principally based on my personal experience 
(including my correspondence with Loew), and, I trust, will throw 
some light upon this otherwise very obscure subject. 
In undertaking the work of describing Amber Diptera, Loew was 
laboring under the strange delusion that fossil forms could be 
described before the classification of recent ones had reached a 
sufficient degree of development. Among the Amber Diptera, the 
Tipulidae , owing to the variety of their plastic characters, espe¬ 
cially in their venation and in the structure of their antennae, afford 
the easiest field for study, and for this reason it was to this family 
that Loew gave the greatest development in his work of 1850 
(“Ueber den Bernstein und die Bernstein-Fauna ”). He distin¬ 
guished eighteen genera in Amber, among which ten were new, 
and the rest were identified with recent forms. Unfortunately for 
Loew, the classification of the recent Tipulidae was, in 1850, in a 
chaotic condition. Before beginning his work, he should have at 
least prepared himself for it by a careful study of the contemporary 
literature on the recent forms of Tipulidae. His publication shows 
that, in this respect, he had not done his duty, otherwise he would 
not have committed the mistake of describing as new the Amber 
genus Allarithmia, but would have recognized in it the recent genus 
E, • iocera , described by Macquart twelve years before. Loew had 
remained in ignorance of Macquart’s genus still later, when, in 
Peters’s “ Ileise in Mozambique,” he described a species of the same 
genus as a Limnobia, although he had noticed its anomalous anten¬ 
nae, which should have reminded him of his own fossil Allarithmia d 
1 In extenuation of this mistake of Loew’s it may be alleged that, although Dr. 
Peters’s volume was dated 1862, it had been printed ten years before, in 1852 (comp. 
Hagen, “Bibl. Entom.,” Vol. II, p. 886, Addenda, under Loew, No. 136). Loew’s share 
in that volume may therefore have been written almost contemporaneously with his 
paper of 1850. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for his not having been aware of the 
existence of Friocera Macq. (1838), and for bis having said : “ The remarkably anomalous 
structure of the antennae of this species does not permit its being placed in any of the 
subgenera that have been separated from Limnobia. This structure of the antennae is 
