XU BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



panding to the form of a volume, and all of them after the fir.st five 

 years of work direct and valuable contributions to the taxonomy of the 

 order have appeared from his pen. 



We do not propose to analyze these, but only to call attention to two 

 of the more important, and to point out that these monographic essays 

 and synopses covered with fair equality the entire series of Coleoptera, as 

 one may see by e:iamining Henshaw's appendix to LeConte and Horn's 

 Classification of the Coleoptera of the United States, published last year. 

 "They contain evidence," says his pupil and colleague, Dr. Horn, "of 

 patient and original research and added greatly to science. His work 

 was in every case an improvement on what had previously been done ; he 

 left a subject better than he found it." 



These studies in the classification of the Coleoptera of our country 

 culminated in a couple of remarkable works, published in 1876 and 1883, 

 in each of which he was joined by his ardent coadjutor, Dr. Horn. 



The first was a thorough monographic revision, of the Rhynchophora 

 or weevils of our country, forming an entire volume of the Proceedings 

 of the American Philosophical Society, in which Dr. Horn elaborated a 

 single family, the Utiorhynchidf^, while the remainder, or about three- 

 fourths of the work was prepared by Dr. LeConte. This memoir not 

 only supplied a great need in American Coleopterology, but it completely 

 revolutionized the accepted classifications of the day, and will make its 

 way felt over a broader field than that it purported to cover. For Le- 

 Conte, carrying out ideas which he had previously communicated to this 

 Academy in 1867 and 1874, showed in this vast and inferior type of 

 beetles the presence of characters, principally in the arrangement of the 

 pieces on the under surface of the thorax, which isolated them completely 

 from all other Coleoptera, and allowed the use, in their sub-division, of 

 characters drawn from quite dift'erent parts than were used in the sub- 

 division of the normal series. The three great series which he thus es- 

 tablished within the Rhyncophera were considered by him as the taxo- 

 nomic equivalents of the six great groups, Adephaga, etc., in the normal 

 series. Complaint has been made (from the other side of the ocean of 

 course) that such fundamental changes should not be " based upon the 

 study, however accurate, of the fauna of a limited district or country," 

 and entomologists are accordingly warned not to allow this essay " to dis- 

 turb a generally accepted classification." Such persons overlook the re- 

 peated statement of the learned authors that they have re-enforced their 

 study of the American forms by the examination of many foreign types, 

 and fail to notice that the principal novelty from which all the others 



