HATCH: COLEOPTERA 555 



masses of propaganda against the amateur, and it is only the amateur who can 

 have the requisite leisure. There is also the question of the university, for at 

 the moment all our intelligent young people are encouraged, and almost forced, 

 to go to the standardized universities. These are either located in cities or have 

 so grown and destroyed their surroundings that their students are practically 

 cut off from contact with living nature — not merely from the Lepidoptera. We 

 need a drive against the academic degree as a thing of high value in itself, and a 

 restoration of the types of education that give the young adult all the things 

 that cannot be handled in the classroom (among them living biology, as well as 

 the fine arts, business, geography, and the like). As far as our special field is 

 concerned, a major offender is the so-called "Graduate Record Examination," 

 which has been getting a good deal of prestige since the Second World AVar and 

 which, so far as I can find out, gives practically no credit score for the things 

 a good entomologist needs to have: independent thought, aptitude, knowledge 

 of living biology as distinguished from textbooks, and the special skills that en- 

 able him to obtain and record his facts. 



And I almost forgot the museums. They are necessary recording bodies, 

 where all the tangible and durable sources of knowledge can be preserved. They 

 can be sources of research in only part of the field, but from every biological 

 problem enough material should go to a museum and be saved there to enable 

 later workers to confirm that the person who did that piece of research had 

 what he thought he had. The museum also needs money for housing and money 

 for care; staff for routine work and also some staff members with leisure to fol- 

 low up research leads as they appear. 



This is the future for the Lepidoptera, as I see it, and equally for all fields of 

 research in natural history. I leave it to the reader to decide how much is warn- 

 ing and how much prophecy. 



COLEOPTERA 



Melville H, Hatch 



University of Washington, Seattle 



These remarks on a century of progress in the study of beetles may be 

 prefaced with the caution that neither the space at the author's disposal nor 

 his knowledge permit more than the merest synopsis of the events involved. The 

 men and books and institutions mentioned are examples only of complex move- 

 ments, and important names frequently may have been left unmentioned. 



In seeking, then, to survey the coleopterologj'- of the last hundred years, we 

 start with men studying beetles. Beetles occur wherever men do, but different 

 beetles occur in different regions. Tlie 3,711 species known from Great Britain 

 (1945), the 8,473 species known from France (1935-1939), the 9,979 species 

 and 4,409 varieties known from Italy (1929), and the 300,000 species known 

 from the world are indices to the complexity of the problem. 



Two approaches to coleopterology have developed. Tlie study of local faunas 

 has the advantage of being based on explorations that have been in month-by- 



