234 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 84 



for research, and the problems on hand at present and those contem- 

 plated are mostly of an entomological nature. He also acts as Ento- 

 molngical Adviser to the Irish Free State Department of Agriculture. 



FRANCE AND HER COLONIES 



h^'ance has ])roduccd many very famous entomologists, and a 

 number of great works were published in that country as early as the 

 early part of the eighteenth century. As time went on a number of 

 high-placed individuals took up the study of entomology, and it might 

 almost be said to have become fashionable at one time. Cuvier and 

 Bufifon and their work excited much interest at court. Later Count 

 Dejean, one of the generals of the first Napoleon, was a famous 

 Coleopterist. 



The French have done much in economic entomology. One of the 

 earliest and most important of all the early papers in economic ento- 

 mology was that by Henri Louis Duhamel Du Monceau, who was 

 commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences in May, 1761. to 

 investigate in Western France a severe outbreak of a grain moth, 

 now known as the Angoumois grain moth (Sitotroga ccrcalcUa). 

 An admirable investigation was made by Duhamel and his assistant, 

 Mathieu Tillet, and the results were published in Paris in 1762, a 

 leather-bound volume of 314 pages illustrated by three plates of 

 admirable drawings. Mr. Perez Simmons has published a short 

 article, praising this monographic contribution, in the Journal of 

 Economic Entomology for October, 1929. 



During the early part of the nineteenth century there were nine 

 French writers on economic entomology who should be especially 

 mentioned. 



J. V. Audouin (1797-1841) was Professor of Entomology in the 

 Museum at Paris and wrote much on anatomical and taxonomical 

 subjects and also published many interesting biological papers. His 

 studies of the blister-beetles were important and were summarized 

 in his " Prodromus of a Natural, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and 

 Medical History of the Cantharides." In 1835 he published a note 

 on a larva that does great damage to oat fields. He also published on 

 the woolly root-louse of the apple and a number of short papers on 

 insects injurious to forest trees; also on vine insects, the hair-worm, 

 parasites of white grubs, on the diseases of the silkworm of com- 

 merce, on insects of the mulberry, and on the insects that attack wood 

 used in building. His largest work of this character was published 

 in 1840-42 and was entitled (translated) " History of Insects In- 

 jurious to the Vine, and Esi^ecially the Pyralis." 



