INTRODUCTION. 



As might have been expected in the case of so large and conspicuous 

 insects as are many of those treated of in the present vohime, the Pim- 

 plinae were among the earUest of the Ichneumonidae to attract the atten- 

 tion of naturalists and we have references to them in Aristotle's History 

 of Animals, and our own countryman Thomas Moufet described at least 

 two of them as early as 1634. There are, also, many other observations 

 of pre-Linnean authors, though unfortunately the majority are too vague 

 to enable us nowadays to refer them to individual species. In Britain, 

 Donovan records several of the larger kinds at the end of the eighteenth 

 century and Marsham gives us a capital account of one species, which is 

 hardly yet identified, in 1797. Stephens' Illustrations fail us in this sub- 

 family, excepting for one or two kinds figured in his Supplement ; but 

 Curtis has several plates dealing with them in his ever useful British 

 Entomology. The first at all reliable Catalogue is that of Desvigncs, 

 published in 1856, and in it we find the number of indigenous kinds placed 

 at little over one hundred, though many were added in 1870, in Marshall's 

 Catalogus ; and the same author's Catalogue of 1872 brought the total for 

 Britain to one hundred and fifty-four species. It is unfortunate that 

 Bridgman and Fitch's excellent Introductory Papers did not reach the 

 Pimplinae at all ; since the consequence is that we have hitherto had 

 actually no reliable account whatever in English of this group, though 

 Bridgman added several species to our catalogue in 1881-89 and described 

 a fair number which he considered to be new to Science ; these with 

 others previously brought forward by Desvignes and about the same time 

 by Capron and Bignell, left the total at one hundred and ninety-nine 

 British species in 1899. A few of them were, however, no more than 

 synonyms and the Banchides were, as placed by Holmgren, at that time 

 regarded as constituting an aberrant group of the Ophioninae. By 

 including the latter in the present volume, synonymizing some of those 

 already included under distinct names and bringing forward eight new 

 kinds, the present total of our Fauna stands at two hundred and eleven 

 different species, which probably much more fully represents the Pim- 

 plinae of our Islands than do the totals of the Cryptinae and Ichneumon- 

 inae in my two former volumes, 



