74 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



in a few years." The Rev. T. A. Marshall has given (Entom. Monthly 

 Mag., i. to iii.) an essay towards a knowledge of the British Homoptera. 

 in which occasionally allusion is made to the European distribution of 

 our British species. 



" The position of the Insect-fauna of Britain may be thus stated : 

 the late J. F. Stephens commenced in 1827 a systematic descriptive work 

 of all the orders of British Insects as ' Illustrations of British Entomology : 

 it ceased to appear after 1835, until a supplementary volume came out in 

 1846. The Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Orthoptera, Neuroptera were wholly, 

 the Hymenoptera partly, done, the Hemiptera and Diptera altogether left 

 out. In 1839, Mr. Stephens published, in a more compendious form, a 

 4 Manual of British Beetles." In 1849, an attempt was made to supply 

 the gaps in the British Entomology left by Stephens, and a scheme of 

 a series of volumes called ' Insecta Britannica" was elaborated, in which 

 Mr. F. Walker was to undertake the Diptera, Mr. W. S. Dallas the 

 Hemiptera, and great progress having been made in our knowledge cf 

 the smaller moths since 1835, I undertook to write a volume on the 

 Tineina. This scheme was so far carried out, that three volumes on the 

 British Diptera by Mr. F. Walker (assisted by the late A. H. Halidav) 

 appeared in 1851, 1852 and 1856, and my volume on the British Tineina 

 in 1854. In 1859, another great group of the smaller moths was described 

 by S. J. Wilkinson in a volume entitled ' The British Tortrices." The 

 British Hemiptera, not having been done by Mr. Dallas, were undertaken 

 by Messrs. Douglas and Scott for the Ray Society ; and in 1865 a 4to 

 volume was issued, containing the Hemiptera, Heteroptera, leaving the 

 Homoptera for a second volume, still in progress. Even in this elaborate 

 work little or nothing is said of the geographical distribution out of 

 Britain of our British species. The same will apply to the late J. F. 

 Dawson's ' Geodephaga Britannica," published in 1854; to Westwood's 

 ' Butterflies of Great Britain,' published in 1855 ; and to E. Newman's 

 'Illustrated Natural History of British Moths," published in 1869. 



" I believe I do not at all exaggerate if I say that for many years 

 Entomology was pursued in this country with an insularity and a narrow- 

 mindedness of which a botanist can scarcely form a conception. The 

 system of only collecting British Insects was pursued to such an extent, 

 that it was almost a crime to have a non-British insect in one's posses- 

 sion ; if accidentally placed in one's cabinet it might depreciate the value 

 of the entire collection, for Mr. Samuel Stevens can assure you that the 

 value of the specimens depends very much upon their being indubitably 



