PROGRESS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE ODONATA. 7 



counties of England ; possibly riafi/clcis Jiicnh.r, Cbarp., oi* Sji/iini/D- 

 notiii^ ojanopteriix, Chai'p.,a northern fonn, known to occur in Sweden, 

 Germany, and north central Franco. All this should encourage 

 British orthopterists to further energies, and much remains to be 

 discovered in distribution, especially in Ireland ; in the south of that 

 island, fresh and interesting forms might well occur. British 

 entomologists are rapidly losing the insular prejudices that interfered 

 so much with real work in the past, but they should remember, and 

 orthopterists more especially, that our fauna is not a whole, but 

 geographically an unimportant part of the fauna of Europe. Remember- 

 ing this, our orthoptera become far more comprehensible, and it is 

 always as an outlying part of the fauna of northern and central 

 Europe that it must be regarded. The six species that we have of 

 Steiiiihothnix may well puzzle the orthopterist at the beginning of 

 his studies, but it should be remembered that they represent four very 

 distinct divisions of the genus, which has about sixty species in Europe 

 alone. If the synoptical Pnnlromiis of Brunner, with its German and 

 entomological Latin, be hard to understand, and this is very true, one 

 may recommend the excellent work, most useful even for the British 

 orthopterist, Finot's Fannc de la France, Insectea Orthopterex, Paris, 

 1889, written of course, in French, which gives an excellent illus- 

 tration of almost every British species, and pages of useful and 

 instructive information. 



The task of the last few years has been, and rightly, rejection. 

 The work of the next decade must be addition. 



The progress of our knowledge of the Odonata (Dragonflies) 

 during a century and a half. 



By W. F. KIRBY, F.L.S., F.E.S., &c. 



At the request of my friend Mr. Tutt, I have much pleasure in 

 laying before the readers of the Kntoinoloi/i fit's Fwcoril a sketch of the 

 growth of our present knowledge of the dragonflies. a group which has 

 attracted a considerably increased amount of attention during the last 

 ten years. For convenience I will use the nomenclature of my catalogue 

 of 1890 throughout. 



Part I. — Lixnean and Fabrician period (1758-1798). — In 1758 

 Linne published the 10th edition of his Siji^teuia Xaturae, and introduced 

 the binomial system of nomenclature in a permanent form, and thus 

 rendered the modern system of classification possible. He then 

 included all the dragonflies known to him under the genus T/thdlnla, 

 and enumerated only eighteen species, thirteen of which were Swedish, 

 and the rest exotic. With the exception of niliidtissiums and fmripata 

 {(TOtiijihiuac), arnca (Cunliilinac), tirandi>i and jniicca (J-'.sr/niinai'), 

 ririjo {Aiirioninac), aufX jiiicUa (('(icnaf/riiininac), all these belonged to 

 the subfamily Lihdlidinac, and, in the 12th edition of the Si/stcii) a (1767), 

 three more JAbdlidinai' were added, bringing up the total number of 

 species to 21. On turning to the works of Fabricius, we find that in 

 his Si/st('iii(i Kntiiiiiohxiiac of 1775, he was already able to raise the 21 

 species described by Linne to 80, divided into three genera ; Libdliila 

 (25 species); J-'sJnia (4 species); and A<iii()n{2 species, i-in/D and i>\idla), 

 but l)y the end of the century (his PliiioninhHiia Si/stcmatica, vol. ii., 

 appeared in 1793, and the Supplement in 1798) the number had been 



