THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 233 



A LIST OF THE COLEOPTERA OF THE SOUTHERN 



CALIFORNIA ISLANDS, WITH NOTES AND 



DESCRIPTIONS OF NEW SPECIES. 



BV H. C. FALL, PASADENA, CAL. 



Early in May of the present year (1897) the Pasadena Science Club 

 sent three of its members on a month's general collecting trip to certain 

 of the Santa Barbara islands lying off the coast of Southern California. 

 While none of the members of the expedition were, strictly speaking, 

 entomologists, a considerable experience in collecting, combined with 

 some preliminary instruction, enabled them to devote intelligently a 

 portion of their time to the collection of insects, more especially of the 

 Coleoptera. 



The islands visited were in the order named, Santa Barbara, San 

 Nicolas, and San Clemente, distant respectively forty, sixty, and fifty 

 miles from the nearest point on the mainland. Inasmuch as the entire 

 material in Coleoptera, consisting of forty-six species and upward of one 

 thousand specimens, has been submitted to me for study, it seems a 

 fitting occasion for presenting as complete a list as possible of the 

 coleopterological fauna of the entire group of islands, from Santa Cruz to 

 Guadalupe. 



To Eastern collectors it may seen a matter for wonderment that so 

 interesting a field should so long remain, entomologically speaking, 

 practically unexplored ; yet it must be remembered that entomologists 

 are here exceedingly few and far between, and the islands are, with the 

 exception, for the past few years, of Catalina, nearly or quite uninhabited 

 and not conveniently accessible. Every now and then, to be sure, an 

 Eastern man appears with bottles and net, but to him the whole vast 

 region is a terra incognita. Mountain and desert and valley offer 

 opportunities without number ; he takes the goods the gods provide and 

 troubles not himself about possibilities in lands hull down in the Pacific. 

 And so it happens that the few beetles recorded from the islands we owe 

 to the kindness of one or another of the botanists or ornithologists who 

 have at long intervals found their way there. 



It is believed by those best competent to judge that these islands are 

 the summits of a submerged mountain range forming a part of the 

 mainland, or at least connected with it as a peninsula, until after the 

 beginning of the Quaternary Period, when it was separated and broken 



