II. C. FALL 
70 
With laticeps as was sugg;este(l by Horn. Both LoConte’s and 
Motschulsky’s papers bear the date 1850, and I have no means 
of ascertaining which appeared first, moerens, however, takes 
page precedence over uniformis. In the three males and four 
females before me the prothorax varies from as wide as long to a 
little longer than wide. As a rule it averages somewhat narrower 
than in longicollis, a condition which is just the reverse of the 
statements made in Horn’s table, but doubtless specimens of 
moerens will occur with the width a little in excess of the length, 
just as in longicollis. 
Moerens was described from Point Reyes, about thirty miles 
north of San Francisco. Most of the examples at hand were 
collected by Dr. Fenyes at Pacific Grove, a somewhat greater 
distance south of San Francisco. The Sonoma specimen was 
collected by Ricksecker. 
The characters given for the generic separation of the Malach- 
iini in the LeConte and Horn Classification (1883) are precisely 
those given by Horn in his Synopsis of eleven years before. 
Malachius and Microlipus are here separated as follows. 
Antennae inserted on the front nearly between the eyes .... Malachius 
Antennae inserted at anterior edge of front near the sides. Microlipus 
This sounds like an important and satisfactory distinction, 
but investigation proves it to be very far from such, at least so 
far as our representatives of the two genera are concerned. In 
all cases the antennae are inserted near the anterior margin of the 
front, their distance apart being rather more than twice their 
distance from the eyes, the thickened edge of the antennal pits 
contiguous to the epistornal suture. It is possible that the an- 
tennae are more frontal in position in the European species of 
Malachius than in ours, in fact in M. aeneus, our only introduced 
species, they do appear to be a trifle more removed from the 
frontal margin, but this seems due rather to a greater thickening 
of the raised edge of the antennal pits than to any real difference 
in position. Following the descriptions of the four known species 
of Microlipus, Horn states further that this genus resembles 
Malachius in form and general aspect, but the s})ecies are more 
slender, the legs longer and the antennae are scarcely serrate, 
and adds that the sexual characters serve as a means of readily 
separating Microlipus from all the other genera of the tribe in our 
TRANS. AM. ENT. SOC., XLIH. 
