OBITUARY. 259 



But it is as a voluminous describer of new exotic species, particularly 

 in the Gcouictiidae and i'l/ralidae, that his name will chiefly go down 

 to posterity; most of all as the world's first specialist in Oeinnetridae. 

 We owe him a deep debt of gratitude for the prodigious amount of 

 pioneer work which he did in these directions, and although he never 

 evolved any consistent s} stems of classification, such as those which 

 have made the reputation of Hampson and Meyrick, his keen eye for 

 specific distinctions — in large measure the result, as he used to say, of 

 his early devotion to the smallest Lepidoptera — stood him in good 

 stead and enabled him to lay foundations upon which it is left toothers 

 to build. Prior to his work for the Tring Museum, which has 

 engrossed his energies for more than 20 years and to the extent of 

 which his numerous important papers m the Novitates Zoolotpcae 

 bear witnesss, he was engaged in arranging the (ieometridae and 

 i'l/ralidae of the British Museum Collections and to him certainly 

 belongs the credit of rescuing them from absolute chaos into some 

 kind of order, however much remained still to be done. Some papers 

 describing the new genera and species of the J'yralidae appeared in the 

 Annals and Magazine of Natural Histonj, series 6, vols. vii. to ix. 

 (1891-92), but no corresponding articles were published on the 

 Geoiiietridae and numerous MS. names in the Museum Collection have 

 remained to cause occasional perplexity. 



To a knowledge of the Indian Geometrid fauna Mr. Warren con- 

 tributed two large papers prior to the Tring work (Froc. Zool. Soc. 

 bond., 1888, pp. 5492-389, 1893, pp. 341-434). On the Oeouietridae of 

 New Guinea — almost unknown until a few years ago — it is scarcely 

 too much to describe him as the sole writer up to the present ; par- 

 ticularly important are his three voluminous papers on those of the 

 Upper Aroa, Angabunga and Biagi Rivers {Norit. ZuoL, x., pp. 343- 

 414; xiii., pp. 61-161 ; xiv., pp. 97-186). Of the apparently endlessly 

 rich fauna of tropical South America he has worked out a prodigious 

 number of new forms, either alone (for the Tring Museum) or in col- 

 laboration with Messrs. Schaus and Dognin ; most of the genera of this 

 fauna are of his own creating. Similar remarks might be made 

 regarding the Geometrids of the ^Ethiopian Region, except that here 

 our knowledge still remains somewhat more fragmentary. 



For the last five or six years Mr. Warren's principal work has been 

 at the Nocttiidae, in connection with Seitz's great undertaking The 

 Macrolepidojitera of the World. Excepting a few pages at the begin- 

 ning, the whole of volume 3 (pp. 9-511), dealing with the Palearctic 

 Noctuids, is from his pen, and he was hard at work on the Indo- 

 Australian at the time of his death. He also contributed to volume 2 

 of the same work the short section dealing with the Palajarctic 

 Cyniato))}wridae. 



The more general biological problems seem to have possessed little 

 attraction for him, or perhaps he had no time for them or thought 

 them inconsistent with his other labours. On the rare occasions, for 

 instance, when he mentions the word " mimic," it is nearly always in 

 a non-technical sense, as when we are told that a South American 

 Moth closely "mimics" an African genus. Descriptive work, pure 

 and simple, was his forte, and this is in general so concise, and withal 

 so adequate, that the recognition of his species, in spite of an 

 occasional paucity of structural clues, is as a rule a matter of no great 



