JAMES CHESTER BRADLEY 
253 
made to collect material. Thus the present paper can be looked 
upon only as affording what I trust will prove a firm foundation 
for a knowledge of the genus, and as neither exhaustive, nor in 
any sense complete. 
It is prol)al)le that there exist in the southwest very many 
species of this genus that remain unknown, and that the distribu- 
tion of many, if not most of the species is decidedly restricted. 
Therefore, in order to prevent confusion in the future, it has 
seemed to me all the more important to review at this time our 
existing species from type material, and to establish more fully 
their specific characteristics. In drawing up the descriptions of 
the new species I have followed throughout one form, which 
includes only characters that have proved to differ in different 
species. Of course some of these characters will vary within the 
limits of certain species and remain constant in others, and there 
are series of species alike in certain characters which differ in only 
a few, but I think it would not be presumptuous to suggest that 
future describers of species within this genus should not omit 
any of the characters mentioned in, let us say, the description of 
B. crassa below. 
The meagerness of our actual knowledge of Brachycistis is 
shown by the fact that as yet we do not know with certainty a 
single female. The two species included b}" Fox tentatively in 
this genus, although without any conviction that they really 
belonged there, I shall leave there, for lack of definite evidence 
to the contrary. However, there are two reasons, besides the 
one mentioned by Fox, why I do not believe that they can belong 
to Brachycistis. The first is that while one of these species was 
described from Alissouri, and I have since seen specimens in the 
collection of IMr. Nathan Banks from Virginia, males of Brachy- 
cistis are not known from east of the ^Mississippi River. It is 
hardly probable that the tolerably common and easily collected 
winged males, fl3ung as the}' do to light in numbers, would be 
entirely overlooked by our eastern collectors, while only the 
females which must be very rare, or at least by their obscure 
habits difficult to collect, found. The other reason is that the 
females described as B. rutilans and B. bimacidatiis possess a 
peculiar leaflike expansion of the posterior coxae, which does not 
occur in the males, but which does occur in both the males and 
TR.\NS. AM. ENT. SOC., XLIII. 
