WOKKS ON BRITISH COLEOPTERA. 29 



lately published as another of the Blue books of the British Museum. We 

 have noticed, also, with much satisfaction, the Monograph of the European 

 species of Catops, by Mr. Murray, in the Annals of Natural History, illus- 

 trated with many wood-cuts, exhibiting the minutiae of sculpture, the mi- 

 croscopical investigation of which he has here applied to the discrimination 

 of the species of this rather perplexing group, and has carried it out to a 

 degree of refinement hitherto unattempted for the purposes of Descriptive 

 Entomology. Although no independent work, of any extent, on this order 

 has issued from the press in Britain, during the past year, yet the Ento- 

 mologists' Annual, continued for 1857 by the enterprising and persevering 

 editor, bears witness that the study of the indigenous species has been 

 pursued with commendable zeal, the additions to the British Fauna in this 

 order, for the year 1856, amounting to not less than sixty species, two of 

 which, however, are stigmatised with a note of suspicion, as possible 

 " importations." 



Mr. Stainton informs us — and who should be better authority than the 

 Editor of the " Entomologist's Intelligencer" — that there is at present a 

 cry out for a " Manual of British Beetles." How much this clever writer 

 himself, and his "Manual of British Butterflies and Moths," may have had 

 to do with exposing the want, and suggesting the feasibility, of such an 

 undertaking, and thus evoking that importunate voice which pursues him, 

 as he confesses, even to the shades of Lewisham, it is not necessary now 

 to inquire. We should be sorry if we were — most erroneously — accounted 

 unfavourable to anything tending to make the science more popular, and 

 to aid the amateur collector in giving to his gatherings both a local habita- 

 tion and a name. On this head we are quite at one with our valued con- 

 tributor, Dr. Loew, whose remarks the reader will find in the volume for 

 1856; see page 68, and elsewhere in the same article. Still, we would 

 venture to deprecate anything like a hasty compilation of the sort referred 

 to, got up merely to meet the supposed demand. It is not unnatural to 

 conjecture that such a Manual would probably be framed on the model of 

 Mr. Stainton's popular monthly issue for the benefit of the Butterfly-collec- 

 tors. Now, although the Lepidopterist of to-day is scientifically much in 

 advance of the "Aurelian" of the last generation, still the study of the Co- 

 leoptera has kept its vantage-ground in the literature of Entomology ; and 

 it demands to be treated accordingly. A writer on British Coleoptera, who, 

 confining himself to his local materials, should at the same time indulge in 

 changes of the system and nomenclature, in accordance with his private 

 views, as to parts of his subject which he had perhaps studied almost for 



