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invite a study as particular as the Coleoptera have received, and some of 

 them, perhaps, will afford a field as ample. Local Faunas, Monographs, 

 the collections of voyagers, all have their use in building up parts of the 

 unfinished fabric ; and the productions of our own country naturally will 

 occupy the greatest number of students at home. But, with the excep- 

 tion of the two orders before named, the British collector quickly finds 

 himself at a loss for any ready means of determining even the names of 

 the puny myriads that flit or creep, dive or burrow, on every side about 

 him. In default of manuals devoted to the productions of our own country, 

 we may look abroad, next, to those which describe the insects of the 

 nearest mainland, from which chiefly the island Fauna seems derived, a 

 colony diminished by the broken continuity of land, and the lower summer 

 temperature of a seagirt shore. The Fauna of France, whose territorial 

 limits lean on the snowy buttresses of the Alps and Pyrenees, on either 

 hand, flanking a gulf of the Mediterranean, whither many of the insects 

 seem as if transmitted, with the hot winds, from the African coasts oppo- 

 site, is enriched with Alpine and southern forms wholly strange to us. 

 But a comparison of the Coleoptera of each, points to the inference that 

 the British insect Fauna might almost be presented as an extract from that 

 of neighbouring France ; while the species deficient in the latter may 

 mostly be found in the Scandinavian Fauna, along with the great majority 

 common to the three countries. Passing beyond that order and the Lepi- 

 doptera, the materials for such a comparison have been hitherto more im- 

 perfect. We have coupled together, at the head of this article, the chief 

 contributions to the Dipterous Fauna of Scandinavia, which have appeared 

 since Meigen's Systematic Description of the Diptera of Europe was com- 

 pleted. The impulse given by that classical work to the study of this 

 order has tended to antiquate itself in some degree, as Meigen's terse and 

 scientific definitions became inadequate, amid the additions made by the 

 industry of his scholars. Among those who have contributed to such a 

 revolution, the Swedes may justly claim a foremost place ; and we would 

 scarcely dispute Bohemann's judgment of the great work of Zetterstedt 

 now concluded, that no other country can show a descriptive catalogue of 

 its Diptera so complete and accurate as Sweden possesses.* Restricted to 

 the limits of the Scandinavian and Jutish peninsulas and islands, it does 

 not affect the character of a DIPTEEOLOGIA EUROP.EA, as Oken has ven- 

 tured to style it.f But for the determination of the British species of 

 Diptera in general, we have, up to this time, no book of reference as use- 



* Aarsberiittelse for 1847-8. t Isis, 1848, 696. 



