190 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 



Notes on the Tipulidae of the Glasgow District. 



By George W. Ord. 



[Read 2Sth September, 1897.] 



The following list of Tipulidae, collected in the AYest of Scotland 

 during tiie present summer by Mr. Robert Henderson, of the 

 Andersonian Naturalists' Society, and myself, must necessarily 

 very imperfectly represent the number and distribution of the 

 species in the district, and it is with some hesitation that we 

 present it at all. 



The Diptera have been very much neglected by British ento- 

 mologists. In Scotland matters in this respect are even worse 

 than they are in England. Mr. Yerral], the most prominent 

 English authority on the Diptera, published in the Entomologists' 

 Monthly Magazine (Yols. XXIII., XXIY., XXY.) "A List of 

 British Tipulidje," giving tables for the identification of all the 

 genera, and of the species of the principal genera. Mr, P. H. 

 Grimshaw, of the Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh, to 

 whom I am much indebted, advised me to get Yol. II. of Schiner's 

 Fauna Austriaca (Diptera), and the minute descriptions of species 

 in that splendid work have, in the majoritj^ of cases, removed 

 all the doubts we may have had as to the correctness of our 

 identifications. A number of species still remains to which we 

 have been unable to assign positively any specific name, and these 

 we have been compelled to leave over for further study, and in 

 the hope of obtaining fresh specimens next year. 



Of those included in the list, only in regard to the species of the 

 genus Molophilus, and to one or two species of Tipula, is there 

 any uncertainty, and of these we can only say, as Mr. Yerrall says 

 of many of the species in his list, " we believe we have them." 

 All systems of classification are more or less artificial. I cannot 

 see that the modern method of classifying by the neuration of 

 the wings is less artificial than its predecessors. The neuration 

 exhibited by any single species is by no means constant, as often the 

 two win2;s of the same insect exhibit strikinsr diflferences. The 



