GEORGE HENRY HORN. XUl 



many others would not such a work have l)een the occasion to change 

 the names and to resurrect some foi-gotten dead, to render the syn- 

 onymy more and more difficult. M. Horn, like his compatriots 

 generally and the English, shows himself a man of practical sense. 

 His names are, above all, those consecrated by usage, by the au- 

 thority of the classic monographs, by the authors of great descrip- 

 tive works who have something else to do than to search for ques- 

 tions of 'anteriority,' to seek if the name consecrated by all the 

 great authors had not been preceded, perhaps by a month, by some 

 other fallen in the dust. For this we congratulate him warmly." 



The most general work in whose production Dr. Horn was con- 

 cerned was the 'Classification of the Coleoptera of North America' 

 '"^ (1883). An analysis of it is given by Dr. Scudder in his bio- 

 graphical notice of Dr. LeConte,* and it has been characterized by 

 Prof Sn^ith as representing the ripe experience of Dr. LeConte, the 

 broader student of nature, and the critical and accurate knowledge 

 of technical detail characteristic of Dr. Horn. 



Two notices of this work are perhaps less familiar, to American 

 readers at least, and we venture to quote from them. One of these 

 was by Dr. Dohru in the Stettiner Zeitung for 1884. Like his 

 notice of Horn's Carabid paper, it consists in the main of translated 

 extracts, but his concluding paragraph is directly concerned with 

 our present subject: "After this introduction, which comprehends 

 the entire domain of the classification of known beetles, the authors 

 treat only of the families living in North America. Needless to 

 say that Dr. G. Horn was eminently fitted for this work, for upon 

 his younger shoulders had the older master, in the course of his later 

 and disease-stricken years, transferred the gi-eater and heavier part 

 of the tiresome labor. I repeat that Dr. Horn's approved pen has 

 furnished a work which could be written only by one having access 

 to rich and extensive material, and whose iron industry and inborn 

 talent enabled him to marshal this material and make use of it in a 

 brilliantly scientific manner. Since the overwhelming majority of 

 the genera of beetles occurring in North America are represented 

 also in the Old World, it is self-evident that the present volume is 

 to be strongly recommended to the close study of all ' Coleoptero- 

 philes.' " 



The second notice of the ' Classification ' to which we have re- 



•■■ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1884; Transactions of the 

 American Entomological Society vol. xi. 



TRANS. AM. KNT. SOC. APRIL, 1898. 



