I The West Coast Species of Pedilus Fisch. 



(Corphyra Sayy^ 



H. C. FALL 



j;j I have in this essay used the generic name Pcdilus in place of the 



' long established Corphyra of Say, in deference to the opinion of 



li Mr. Champion, as expressed in the "Biologia," although I have had 



jl' no opportunity of personally verifying his conclusions. The differ- 



i ences in ventral formation of Pedilus and Corphyra, as originally 



11 stated by Du Val, and cited by Horn in his first Synopsis — Trans. 



I Am. Ent. Soc, 1871, p. 278, — if correctly represented, would 

 ^ appear to be amply sufficient for their separation, but there is prob- 

 L ably some misapprehension here. 



'' It is a little remarkable that with all the collecting done within 



I I the bounds of California prior to the arrival of the " '49ers," no 

 ^ species of this genus were made known by either Eschscholtz, Man- 



nerheim or Motschulsky, although several are more or less abun- 



I dant in the vicinity of San Francisco. It was left for Le Conte, in 

 ;; 1851, to describe the first species {piiuctulatus) from this region, 



and in his synopsis of the genus in 1855 this was the only one known 

 from the West Coast. Two more — vittatus and funehris — were 



I I described by Horn in 1871, and on working up the extensive 

 li material brought back from the Coast by G. R. Crotch in 1873, six 

 'I more species were added by the same author. At this time Horn 



presented a table for the separation of the West Coast species, and 



remarked that "the number from the Pacific region now equals that 



from the entire region east of the Rocky Mountains." The last 



paper that has appeared on the genus is a short review of all the 



; species of our fauna by Dr. Horn in 1883, in which one new Cali- 



i| fornian form — flahcUatiis — is made known. Of the ten described 



forms, funehris and distiugue}idus prove to be only color phases of 



1 1 puuctulatus and hardii respectively, the net result being eight distinct 



I species known to this region up to the present time. 



In a recent study of the West Coast material contained in my own 

 collection, supplemented by the greater part of that in the coUec- 



