INTRODUCTION 



The Phalcunidee arc a family of moths of great extent. There arc eight 

 hundred species of this family enumerated in Staudinger and Wocke's Cata- 

 logue of the Lepidoptera of Europe. In the present work, between three 

 and four hundred species are described, and it is not unlikely that nearly a 

 thousand species will be found on the continent north of Mexico and the 

 West Indies. The limits to which this work is confined are all of America 

 north of Mexico and the West Indies, i. e., all north of the southern boundary 

 of the United States, including British America, Arctic America, and Green- 

 land, as the latter belongs to the same (circumpolar) fauna as Arctic Amer- 

 ica, while the insects of the coast of Northern Labrador are in many cases 

 identical with those of Greenland. 



I will now enumerate the sources from which my material has been 

 derived, beginning with the Arctic regions, Labrador. British America, and 

 going down by way of the alpine summits and lowlands of New England to 

 the Middle and Southern Atlantic States, thence to the Southeastern States, 

 to the Trans-Mississippi States, to Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region, 

 closing with the Pacific region, beginning with Vancouver Island and ending 

 with Southern California. The acknowledgments are made in this order in 

 giving the habitats of the different species: 



1. Specimens of geometrid larva' and adult Glaucopteryx from Polaris 

 Bay, Northern Greenland, collected by Dr./ E. Bessels, the scientist of the 

 United States Polaris Expedition. Specimens from Greenland, Iceland, 

 Lapland, and the Swiss Alps, named and forwarded by Dr. 0. Staudinger. 



2. Collections made in Southern Labrador. Straits of Belle Isle, by 

 myself and members of the Williams College Expedition to Labrador and 

 Greenland, in 1860. Larger collections made by myself along the coast, 

 from the Straits of Belle Isle to Hopedale, with specimens received from 

 Okkak, Labrador, through the Moravian missionaries. 



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