337 
aged to get a number of our interesting insects. In those days 
traveling about the Islands was vastly more difficult than at 
present. There was no Mountain Trail Club to cut trails 
through ‘the forests, and a climb to the back of Tantalus and 
back was a hard day’s work. 
From 1877 to 1897 Sharp and Blackburn published a number 
of separate papers on the Coleoptera, and in 1885 they pub- 
lished a joint Memoir, bringing all the information together. 
Other specialists worked at other orders collected by Blackburn. 
This work demonstrated the unique quality of the fauna of the 
Islands and led to a desire for a more extended investigation. 
Owing to the advocacy of Prof. Alfred Newton and Dr. Sharp, 
the British Association for the Advancement of Science appointed 
a committee in the year 1890 “to report on the present state of 
our knowledge of the Sandwich Islands, and to take steps to 
investigate ascertained deficiencies in the fauna, with powers 
to co-operate with the committee appointed for the purpose by 
the Royal Society, and to avail themselves of such assistance 
as may be offered by the Hawaiian Government or the trustees 
of the museum at Honolulu.” The two committees worked 
together for twenty-two years when the work was closed. 
During these years Sharp acted as secretary and also as editor 
to the three volumes of the Fauna Hawaiiensis and worked on 
important sections of the Coleoptera. 
His sound judgment was shown in selecting Dr. R. C. L. 
Perkins as field naturalist, and to the labors of these two, and, 
in a lesser degree, to the other specialists who worked on the 
different groups of insects, we owe the Fauna Hawaiiensis. In 
no other group of islands in the tropics have the insects been 
worked out so completely. Through this work we have been 
able to realize fully the unique endemism of the fauna, to 
recognize the later emigrants from the native insects, and to see 
evolution “in being’ in a more simple form than in any other 
part of the globe. It has also enabled us to carry on a line 
of economic work with an understanding that would have been 
impossible without it, and which has resulted in a saving of 
many millions of dollars to the agriculture of the Islands. This 
work in turn has been a huge experiment on the death factors 
