8 BULLETIN 185, UKITEiD STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



appearance. These must be restudied before they can be admitted as 

 vaUd additions to our hst, but they must be included here for complete- 

 ness and because of the possibility that they represent actually distinct 

 species. 



All specific names are listed in the genus to which they are at present 

 believed to belong, with no indication of their original or intermediate 

 position. It has not been possible to use parentheses around the author's 

 name to indicate that the species is no longer in the original genus. Only 

 such new names are proposed as were required by obvious homonymy in 

 this list, but these new names are clearly indicated as such and will be 

 listed in a separate index at the end of the checklist. 



The International Rules of Zoological Nomenclature require that adjec- 

 tive specific names agree with theii" generic names in gender. In this list 

 the determination of the gender of generic names is made according to the 

 system proposed by the compiler in a recent paper.' 



An understanding of the method of preparation of this checklist and the 

 reasons for these methods will enable entomologists to use the work without 

 expecting more information or greater accuracy than it is designed to 

 furnish. No one will be more cognizant of its shortcomings than the 

 compiler, but it seems evident that a high degree of accuracy and complete- 

 ness is not so important at this time as the early publication of a basic list 

 upon which to build other contributions. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



The compiler has been fortunate at the commencement of this work in 

 having a comparatively recent date to use as a starting point. The 

 Coleopterorum Catalogus of Junk and Schenkling has been published in 

 170 parts between the years 1910 and 1940. By extracting from that work 

 the species recorded from Latin America a basic list was formed which 

 varied in its "up-to-dateness," from 1910 to 1940. Each family in turn was 

 then brought up to date by making the additions and corrections indicated 

 in the Zoological Record for the succeeding years. The use of the Cole- 

 opterorum Catalogus (as well as of the Zoological Record) was not an 

 umnitigated blessing, however. Great discrepancies in the degree of 

 accuracy of the parts were found, some being relatively free of errors while 

 others are largely unreliable. The number of errors and omissions dis- 

 covered in the Zoological Record for this period since 1910 was a great 

 surprise but leads the compiler to conclude that that useful and, in fact, 

 indispensable work must not be considered to be even reasonably complete 

 over any period of years. 



The basic list of species obtained by the addition of the names in the 

 Zoological Record to those in the Coleopterorum Cata,logus was then 

 checked against several secondary sources including the following: Bruch 

 catalog of Coleoptera of Argentma and supplement, Biologia Centrali- 



' Blackwelder, R. E., The gender of scientific names in zoology. Journ. Washington Acad. Sci., vol. 31, pp. 

 135-140, 1941. 



