f4 The Irish Naturalist. [March, 



BRITISH DRAGONFLIES. 



British Dragonflies (Odonata). By W. J. Lucas, B.A., F.E.S. 

 Pp. xiv. and 356, 27 coloured plates, and 57 figures in text. London : 

 L. Upcott Gill, 1900. Price ^i \\s. 6d. 



Students of the less well-known orders of British insects have received 

 much encouragement in recent years bj' the publication of reliable text- 

 books dealing in detail with the species which inhabit our islands. 

 Mr. Lucas' long-promised monograph on our Dragonflies will take a 

 high place among such books. 



The first fifty-four pages are devoted to introductory matter, the life- 

 history of Dragonflies, the forms assumed by their eggs and nymphs, 

 the structure of the imago, and the place to be assigned to the group 

 among the insects generall}'. Mr. Lucas is undoubtedly right in claim- 

 ing for them ordinal rank. The chapter on the early stages is 

 especially good, and a synoptical table of the nymphs of the various 

 British species should prove useful. The account of the structure of the 

 imago is rather weak morphologically; one does not expect nowadays 

 to have the " lower lip" of an insect described as an unpaired organ 

 comparable to the labrum. The internal organs are almost altogether 

 neglected. 



Careful synoptical tables of the families, sub-families, genera and 

 species, lead on to the systematic portion, which occupies the bulk of 

 the volume. The author may be congratulated on the full way in which 

 he has dealt with each species ; he traces the synonymy, transcribes the 

 diagnosis of the original describer, gives careful original descriptions of 

 both sexes of the imago, as well as of the egg and nymph when known, 

 and furnishes interesting notes on habits, migration, and distribution. As 

 the account of each species necessarily occupies several pages, specific 

 names should have been used as page-headings, in addition to the 

 generic titles. In nomenclature Mr. Lucas follows De Selys Long- 

 champs and M'Lachlan, rejecting the replacement of Gomphns by 

 Acshna and Caloptoyx by As^n'on, which Kirby believes to be required by 

 the law of priority. Though in our own two or three papers on Dragon- 

 flies we followed Kirby, we now consider that eminent systematist to 

 have needlessly upset established usage. Mr. Lucas, however, is not 

 justified in retaining hchmira as a generic name among the Odonata; 

 it belongs properly to a genus of scorpions, and Kirby's Micronytiipha 

 must be substituted. 



The distribution of each species within the British Isles is carefully 

 given, so fai as known, under counties for England and Scotland, and 

 provinces for Ireland. With regard to Irish records, Mr. Lucas has had 

 to rely almost entirely on the notes in De Selys Longchamps' " Libellules 

 d'Europe," and on King's " Neuropterous Fauna of Ireland." Very little 

 has been done since the publication of the latter work in 1888 to extend 

 our knowledge of Irish Dragonflies, and such large and conspicuous 

 species as Libelliila depressa and Cordulegastcr annulaius still rest their claim 



