120 
LOEW AS A DIPTEROLOGIST 
In 1872, Loew described a North American Chrysops ( C. gigan- 
lulits ). In working up my Californian collection of Diptera, I 
described the same species as Silvius trifolium, sp. n., because it 
never occurred to me to look for it among the described species of 
Chrysops. During our interview in Guben (in 1877), I asked 
Loew for the reason of this strange location by him of gigantulus. 
He merely answered, “ It does not look like a Silvius at all.” But 
it looks still less like a Chrysops ! 
In his “ Dipteren-Fauna Siidafrika’s ” (1860), Loew introduced 
two sections of the Cyrtidae: Oncodina and Cyrtina. This sub¬ 
division is reproduced in “ Monographs,” I, p. 21 (1862). As it 
was based merely upon the venation, which is very unsteady in this 
family, the subdivision soon proved a failure. According to this 
grouping, the closely allied genera Philopota W. and Helle O. S. 
would have to be placed in two different sections; Schiner’s sub¬ 
division (“ Diptera Novara,” p. 140-145, 1858) seems to be more sat¬ 
isfactory, at least in the adoption of the natural section Philopotina. 
It is remarkable that in all his papers on Cyrtidae , in which Loew 
had described sixteen species, he had never noticed that the first 
posterior cell, in all the known species of that family, is bisected 
by a cross-vein, which is, so far as known, a character peculiar to 
the family. When I first noticed this character in preparing my 
(as yet unpublished) paper on Cyrtidae, I was much puzzled by 
Loew’s description and figure of Pitliogaster (Opsebius Costa) 
annulatus Loew ( Wien. Put. Monats., 1857, p. 83, Tab. I, f. 1) in 
which that supplementary cross-vein is neither figured, nor men¬ 
tioned in the letter-press, so that at first I took this case for an 
exception to the rule. In examining since Loew’s type-specimens 
in the Berlin Museum, I ascertained that the cross-vein is present, 
and, therefore, that Loew had not noticed it! 
It would almost seem as if Loew’s exuberant working-power 
made him impatient of any delay, and drove him to begin with 
describing before having mastered his subject by preparatory 
study. This haste is most conspicuous in one of his principal 
works, I may say his life-work, the Monograph of the European 
Asilidae (“Ueber die europaischen Raubfliegen,” in the Linnaea 
Entomologica, Vols. II, III, IV, V, 1847-1851). Loew, who 
