No. 2315. TRIBES OF ICHNEUMONINAE—CUSHMAN AND ROHWER. 383 



Ashmead. — Ashmead^ in Ms treatment of the Iclineumoninae 

 groups together, and considers as tribes, Foerster's families Acoeni- 

 toidae, Lissonotoidae, Pimploidae, and Xoridoidae and adds the tribe 

 Labinini, a group not represented in Europe. In his method of 

 treatment and in his choice of characters Ashmead follows very closely 

 the work of Foerster, and in the main his paper is a translation of 

 Foerster with the addition of new and a subsequently described 

 genera. Many of the characters are taken only from the female, 

 which makes it impossible to satisfactorily place males, and the 

 venation is used extensively. The shape and presence or absence 

 of the areolet is used repeatedly as a primary character and much 

 value is attached to the angulation of the discocubitus, the presence 

 or absence of a ramulus, the position of the nervulus, and the point 

 of fractm-e of the nervellus. In fact the entire classification is 

 founded on an insufficient and superficial study of a few types. The 

 characters offered will not apply to all of the species which were 

 placed in the various genera as arranged in Ashmead's collection 

 or that of the United States National Museum as it was arranged 

 by him. Unsatisfactory as his classification is, it has been useful 

 because it brought together and gave some characters for the numer- 

 ous genera described up to 1900. It must be remembered, however, 

 that Ashmead endeavored to include all the described genera, and in a 

 number of cases was forced to use only the descriptions which are 

 frequently insufficient and offer only characters that are often of 

 questionable value. 



Schmiedeknecht. — The treatment of the subfamily Ichneumo- 

 ninae as given by Schmiedeknecht^ in the Genera Insectorum adds but 

 little information which will aid in the satisfactory classification of 

 these insects. The work is fomided, in great part, on that of 

 Foerster and Ashmead, and is a conservative adaptation of their 

 work with the recently described genera included. There are, how- 

 ever, some transfers of genera and in some places certain groups 

 which Ashmead treated as genera are treated as subgenera, yet many 

 of the mistakes made by Ashmead are copied and the same kind of 

 characters are used. It is, however, a useful work and if it shows 

 but little origmality we can perhaps excuse the author because of the 

 difficulty of the group, the area covered, and the lack of representa- 

 tives of many of the genera. 



1 W. H. Ashmead, Classification of the Ichneumon Flies, or the Superfamily Ichneumonoidea, Proc. 

 U. S. Nat. Mus., vol. 23, 1900, pp. 1-220. 



* otto Schmiedeknecht, Subfamily Pimpilinae, Gen. Ins., fasc. 62., 1907, pp. 1-120, pis. 1-2. 



