332 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I37 



"The Flying Apparatus of the Blow-fly" with a subtitle which clearly 

 indicated that his approach was morphological and physiological as 

 well as anatomical. 



At about this time Dr. Snodgrass's painstaking and systematic 

 morphological investigations were beginning to influence workers, 

 though their full impact had to await the appearance of his two 

 volumes, "Anatomy and Physiology of the Honey Bee," in 1925, 

 and "Principles of Insect Morphology," in 1935. At about the 

 same time, though commenced a little later and given text-book pres- 

 entation earlier (1933), the work of the late Dr. Hermann Weber 

 made itself felt in the field of insect morphology. 



An important paper resulting from the stimulus supplied by these 

 two masters of the craft of insect morphology was Maki's (1938) 

 monumental work (in English) on the comparative myology of a 

 series of 47 insects. This series included 5 Diptera representing the 

 families Tipulidae, Stratiomyiidae, Syrphidae, Micropezidae ( = Calo- 

 batidae), and Muscidae. The very extent of Maki's survey coupled 

 with the difficulties of following his diagrams — he portrays the entire 

 musculature, in a halved insect, as stippled areas, or the origins and 

 insertions of muscles, joined by single lines — has, perhaps served the 

 author ill since one is tempted to feel that a paper covering all the 

 orders of insects could not have details required by a worker con- 

 fining himself to a single order; the more so when one cannot get 

 specific information quickly from the difficult diagrams. 



The study of myology in insects cannot escape a dependence on 

 studies of the exoskeleton. Many workers have, in the past, com- 

 pletely ignored the existence of the soft parts of the insect. Studies 

 of individual insects (e.g., Rees and Ferris, 1939, on a tipulid) are 

 valuable to the comparative myologist. When, however, it comes to 

 selecting insects for myological investigation, the invaluable work is 

 that which has combined study of the exoskeleton with phylogenetic 

 speculation and systematics. Examples of interfertility of work in 

 this field in Diptera are the comparative and phylogenetic studies of 

 the late G. C. Crampton (e.g., Crampton, 1925a, on the thoracic scle- 

 rites of nontipuloid nematocerous Diptera) and the relatively few 

 papers in which the late F. W. Edwards (e.g., Edwards, 1926, 1930, 

 Edwards and Keilin, 1928), relying on his own studies and on 

 Crampton's work, allowed himself to indulge in phylogenetic specu- 

 lations about the Diptera.^ 



1 My own initial selection of Anisopxis as a subject for anatomical investiga- 

 tion was, in fact, made by reference to the works of Crampton and Edwards. 



