556 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



month and year-by-year contact with the insects concerned. While decades 

 of work may be required to bring the knowledge of a local fauna to reasonable 

 completion, the problem is of limited scope and the data are close at hand. 



On the contrary, the study of foreign faunas has the advantage of compre- 

 hensiveness and of greater opportunity for general conclusions. The drawback 

 to the broader approach is the investigator's dependence on the work of inci- 

 dental or itinerant collectors. One is at once removed from the data, and the 

 world as a whole is so incompletely explored that conclusions tend to lose in per- 

 manence what they gain in comprehension. Both methods have operated together 

 in the development of beetle studies and are, of course, strictly complementary. 

 Those tremendous areas which lack resident collectors must be explored by the 

 best methods available. The data obtained from the study of local faunas can 

 be fully understood only when examined in the larger setting. It is profiitable, 

 however, to keep the two approaches in mind as we survey the history of the past 

 hundred years of our science. 



When, from the vantage point of some future century, the attempt is made 

 to understand the development of the study of beetles, it will be seen that the 

 hundred years just past have been part of a process of explosive develop- 

 ment. From the perspective of a fully developed coleopterology — one that is, 

 as a whole, at the same high level of development as the study of the German 

 Coleoptera fauna now is the "Kaferkunde" of the present with its 300,000 known 

 species will seem as incomplete as now appear the 594 species of Linnaeus' Sys- 

 tema Naturae of 1758, the 22,399 species of Dejean's Catalogue of 1837, or the 

 77,000 species of Gemminger and von Harold's Catalogus of 1868-1876. 



The modern study of beetles arose in northwestern Europe, in an area roughly 

 bounded by Great Britain, France, northern Italy, Austria, Prussia, and south- 

 ern Scandinavia, in the mid-eighteenth century. During its first hundred years 

 it exhibited most of the tendencies which its second century has served to con- 

 firm and expand : the binomial nomenclature, the specific description, the de- 

 scriptive monograph, the descriptive faunal catalogue and the faunal list, the 

 world list, and the increasing facilities of entomological societies, journals, and 

 musem collections. Even dichotomous analytical keys, which were first used for 

 an entire beetle fauna in Redtenbacher's Fauna Austriaca (1849) were a product 

 of this initial century. And in one respect this first century produced something 

 that our second century has been unable to match, a descriptive catalogue of all 

 previously described species, Fabricius' Sy sterna Eleutheratorum (1801), con- 

 taining 5,172 species. Shortly thereafter the number of known species became 

 so great that no one has since brought them together in a single descriptive work. 



As this first century advanced, the knowledge of beetles began to exhibit 

 signs of maturity in portions of the area of its origin. This is shown particularly 

 in Stephens' Illustrations of British Entomology; Mandihulata, Vols. I-V ( 1828- 

 1832), in which 3,650 species of British beetles were distinguished, a number 

 that was within 100 of the 1945 figure of 3,711. There has been, of course, much 

 reshuffling of the names in this list in the intervening century. Stephens himself 

 reduced the count to 3,470 in his 1839 Manual, and Crotch in 1866 could list 

 only 3,081. But the point is that this was a working out of detail. To a first 

 approximation, the British beetle fauna had been surveyed within seventy-five 

 years of the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae. 



