ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



PHILADELPHIA, PA., MAY, 1914. 



The Desirability of a Bibliographical Dictionary of 

 Entomologists*. 



Fifteen years ago, in locating and studying Burmeister's 

 types of Odonata, it was desirable, as it is in all similar pieces 

 of work, to ascertain the sources from which he had obtained 

 his material, the original collectors, and the dates of the col- 

 lecting, the successive owners into whose hands the specimens 

 had passed and their fate subsequent to their examination and 

 description by Burmeister. Such of this information as was 

 obtained came after a protracted search through the few early 

 references afforded by Hagen's Bibliotheca Entoniologica 

 and by papers by authors later than Burmeister which treated 

 of any of the species included in his Handbuch of 1839. 



Five years ago, in preparing an annotated list of the locali- 

 ties and collectors of Odonata in Mexico and Central America, 

 for the introduction to the Neuroptera volume of the Biologia 

 Centrali- Americana, no precise information was acquired as 

 to the parts of those countries visited by such men as Deppe 

 or McNiel, and even in the case of de Saussure it was not 

 complete. 



It is not only as to collectors and fate of collected material 

 that data are often needed. It is frequently highly desirable 

 to know when, where and under what conditions the describ- 

 ers, the monographers, the systematists did their work, since 

 such information throws light, in many cases, on the results 

 of their labors and on the views which they adopted. At this 

 present time we wish to know something of the personal his- 

 tory of Brackenridge Clemens, a pioneer in the study of the 



* Read at the Atlanta meeting of the Entomological Society of 

 America, December 30, 1913. 



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