THE INCORPORATORS 157 
he published a paper describing over twenty new species of 
Carabid beetles from the eastern United States. 
His attention was next drawn to certain anomalies of geo- 
graphical distribution and his extensive studies of the problems 
resulted in the publication of several important papers on that 
general subject. Dr. LeConte’s father had made the Coleoptera 
his favorite study and had also published papers on mammals, 
reptiles, batrachians, and crustaceans. He had collected a large 
amount of material relating to the natural history of our insects, 
and made a series of water-color illustrations of them and also 
of plants. The son carried on the work thus begun, and during 
his lifetime published more than 60 monographic essays—some 
of them large works—on the Coleoptera and other groups of 
insects, investigating as far as practicable all the various 
phenomena connected with their life-histories. He devoted 
himself especially to systematic work, in a manner new in 
America in his time, defining more than 1,100 of the higher 
groups, and forming nearly 250 synoptic or analytic tables. 
Half of the Coleoptera of the United States were described by 
him for the first time. So extensive and important was his work 
that he may with safety be called the greatest of American ento- 
mologists. That he was so regarded abroad is evidenced by the 
fact that he became an honorary member in all the older and 
larger entomological societies of Europe. 
In 1861, as the result of many years of systematic study of 
American beetles, he published the first part of a classification 
of the Coleoptera of North America, the second part appearing 
the following year, and in 1873, a third part of the same work. 
In the meantime, he had reached the conclusion that the 
Rhynchophora, or weevils, represented a quite distinct group 
of Coleoptera, and in 1876, in association with Dr. Horn, his 
former pupil, he published a thorough monographic revision of 
this group, which completely revolutionized the accepted classi- 
fication of the day. Finally, in 1883, a few months before his 
death, he published (also with Dr. Horn as joint author) a new 
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