THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 387 



this that makes the old-fashioied Lexicon of Samuel Johnston or 

 Noah Webster an enthralHng romance beside a modern dry-as- 

 dust scientific work-of-a-syndicate Hke the Standard Dictionary. 

 It would obviously be impossible to write an interesting ac- 

 count of 264 species of beetles or even of 96 genera, but for the 

 convenience of systematic treatment, this enormous mass of in- 

 dividuals, countless as the sands of the sea, has been marshalled, 

 like the children of Israel, into 12 tribes, and every one of these 

 tribes has several representatives in Ontario. In our day's tramp 

 we shall run across at least one representative of each tribe, from 

 Reuben the first born to little Benjamin, our ruler; in plain terms, 

 from Donacia, the reed beetle, cousin german to the more ancient 

 Cerambycidae, to Chelymorpha and Coptocycla the little Tortoise. 

 Of these twelve tribes, the most numerous in boreal America, as well 

 as the most important, are the five numbered VI-X. These com- 

 prise more than 450 species out of a total (to the family) of less 

 than 600 and more than 70 genera in a total of about 100; i.e., 

 3^ of the entire genera and species belong to five consecutive tribes 

 out of the twelve. Of these five tribes, again, two are supreme, the 

 9th and 10th included by LeConte and Horn in the single tribe of 

 Galerucini or Helmet-grub beetles, with a total of more than 200 

 species and over 40 genera; i.e., nearly half the family. 



In the tropics, where vegetation is most luxuriant, these 

 beetles play an important part in checking the too-lavish growth ; 

 but in the Temperate Zone, where civilized man has brought the 

 earth under cultivation, these twelve tribes, the chosen people of my 

 paper, are nothing better than one of the plagues of Egypt, a most 

 distinctive pest, and man's best wits are taxed to prevent an annual 

 loss of many million dollars. 



The Chrysomelians represent a later development than the 

 Cerambycidae or wood-borers, and their adaptation to succulent 

 herbage and the deciduous foliage of flowering plants pari-passu, 

 with changes in the vegetable kingdom from sporophytes and 

 gymnosperms, presents in its way as wonderful an illustration of 

 adaptive development as more specific examples like symbiosis 

 which has isolated the Yucca and its moth from all creation, till 

 each depends on the other for its very existence and on the other 

 only. 



