PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 133- 



the care it deserves. My own collection, though fairly 

 large, is still far from complete in Rhopalocera. 



The study of the Hetcrocera or moths has been far 

 more neglected than that of the butterflies, and no mono- 

 graph lias yet been attempted. Many of the bigger and 

 more conspicuous moths were described or figured be- 

 fore 1850, but most of the work was done after that date. 

 Some of the earlier writers on S. African moths were 

 Fabricius (1775), Cramer (about 1780), Guenee (1850), 

 Hiibner, Drury and others. 



The first attempt to catalogue the moths of the world 

 was made by Francis Walker (1854 to 1866), and in his 

 extensive work many S. African species were incorpo- 

 rated. In many ways this work is still useful, but had 

 it never been published it might have been better, as the 

 species described therein as new are usually insufficiently 

 characterized and some are described half a dozen times^ 

 usually under several generic names, and in some cases 

 even placed in different, rather remote, families. This 

 will give an idea of the difficulties in recognising 

 Walker's species, and perhaps the only merit of the work 

 is that at the time it was fairly up to date and very few 

 described species have been overlooked, thus making good 

 the want of some of the very old works. 



At about the same time (1853) Herrich-Schiiffer pub- 

 lished his " Aussereurop. Schmetterlinge," in which 

 several species are described from S. Africa. About 1860, 

 Wallengren gave some papers on new S. African Lepi- 

 doptera, and his descriptions are, for his time, about the 

 best I have seen. Zeller, as early as 1839, did some good 

 Avork on Microlepidoptera, and his Lepidoptera Microp- 

 tera (1852) is very useful. Lederer published an excel- 

 lent paper (1863) on the classification of the Pyralidae, 

 which has been used and improved by later workers like 

 Snellen, Meyrick and Hampson. Several S. African 

 species were described in this work. 



From 1870 the ijublications became too numerous and 

 scattered to give anything approaching a complete list. 



