INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. xii 
the former there is not so much as a single Longicorn, and in the 
latter only one. Scarcely less curious, also, than this twofold de- 
ficiency, is the immense preponderance of the weevils,—of which the 
greater portion moreover are absolutely endemic. Being creatures, 
however, by nature, of rather sedentary habits, as compared with the 
Coleoptera generally, there are but few countries in the world which 
have not some species essentially their own : nevertheless since it is 
the tendency of the Madeiran ones to be not only unusually sluggish, 
but apterous, we shall not be surprised to find them in that region 
even more local than in many others; and accordingly there is 
scarcely a single rock of the entire Group which has not some special 
Cureulio to boast of. Thus, for instance, to take Madeira and Porto 
Santo, there are 76 apparently indigenous weevils in the former, and 
27 in the latter; yet I have hitherto been able to deteet only 13 of 
these as common to the two islands. The Dezerta Grande also has 
3 very indigenous members of the Rhyncophora peculiar to it; and 
even the diminutive Ilheo Chao has one. If the weevils however 
thus predominate throughout the cluster, other families and groups 
(which we are accustomed to look upon as almost cosmopolitan) are 
literally unknown. ‘Thus, the Cieindelide have no exponent; nor 
have the great genera Carabus, Silpha, Necrophorus, Telephorus, 
Tentyria, Pimelia, Akis, Asida, Otiorhynchus, &e. The Buprestidiw 
and Pselaphide, which | had regarded in the Insecta Maderensia as 
absent, have been brought to ight by the detection of a single spe- 
cies in each,—though both of them of such extreme rarity that the 
families are, after all, but just expressed. And so with the Hla- 
teride, and the enormous and important department of the Thalero- 
phagous Lamellicorns,—the little Porto-Santan Coptostethus being 
still the sole representative of the former (of which no member, there- 
fore, has been discovered in Madeira proper!); and Dr. Heineken’s 
unique example of Chasmatopterus (which may perhaps have been 
imported into the island*) remaining, as before, our only voucher 
for the existence of the latter. 

quarter of the globe.” I have thought it desirable to dwell upon this point, be- 
cause one of the species admitted into our fauna (on the authority of a unique 
specimen from the collection of the late Dr. Heineken), and which I have marked 
as unquestionably (in my opinion) imported, is the common Kuropean Gyrinus 
natator. — 
* It is singular that there are still no less than 12 species, from the small col- 
lection formed by the late Dr. Heimeken near Funchal, which have not hitherto 
occurred to any other naturalist. And this is the more remarkable, when we 
consider how inefficiently he was able to search, and how great haye been our 
combined labours, at intervals, during the last ten years. Not to mention the 
long period over which the Rey. R. T. Lowe’s investigations had previously ex- 
tended, nor to advert to my own four sojourns in the island, of some eight 
