HISTORY. 3 



his successors, he was not prepared to regard India as a part of the 

 workl, but as a world apart, and eacli fresh kind that he saw fi'om 

 tliere was duly chronicled as a new species.* This practice has led 

 to some chaos, though I have synonyniised nearly all the Palae- 

 arctie forms which he has described as new, since the opportunity 

 has been afforded me by Lt.-Col. Xurse and Lt.-Col. Bingham of 

 examining the type specimens. But where the types have been 

 inaccessible it is not infrequently quite impossible to tell what 

 his insects were, since he habitually used no reference to standard 

 authors, was vague respecting the basal and apical extremities of 

 the thoracic segments, and so unintelligible in his account of the 

 universally recognised terms for the metanotal areas and carinae 

 that I have occasionally been driven to reproduce his accounts of 

 them verbatim. His earlier descriptions lack any but the vaguest 

 venational characters, though in tliis respect his style improved 

 in 1907, and his tables are often quite unreliable {cf. Ann. Mag. 

 Xat. Hist. XX, 1907, p. 21). I have, too, in every instance found 

 it necessary entirely to rewrite his descriptions, simply quoting 

 such involved passages as I dare not attempt to interpret, when- 

 ever the type has been unavailable. Cameron has disposed of 

 a great number of so-called " types " to the British Museum 

 authorities ; but that these are in every case what they purport 

 to be is open to doubt, since specimens bearing the same name 

 and also labelled "type " in his handwriting are to be seen in the 

 collections of the captors. In 1897 and 1899, when he began to 

 describe Indian Ichxeumonid.i:, Cameron appears to have taken 

 ir for granted that nothing, or practically nothing, was known 

 from the Oriental Eegion, beyond that which is contained in 

 Smith's Catalogue of 1873 and Brulle"s work ; consequently one 

 cannot be surprised at his describing as new in 1903, the Sphex 

 Tvgosus of De Geer (1760), which is the Phnj)la hijiartlta of BruUe 

 (1846). With respect to relegating species to their correct genera 

 Cameron was distinctly vague before the publication of Ashmead's 

 tables in 1900 ; and even subsequently he cannot always be relied 

 upon in this respect, since he seems blindly to have followed 

 characters there set forth, with such results as the inclusion of 

 male Lissonota (Pimplix.i:) in the genus MesoJeptus (Trypho- 

 niX-e), &c. I consider few of Cameron's genera stable, and 

 surmise that he erected them whenever at a loss in the recoo-uised 



* I have seen sixteen specimens labelled by Mr. Peter Cameron as the 

 "types" of bis species, of which I can discover no published descriptions, 

 and as direct appeals to him for references, both on my own behalf and 

 that of the British Museum, have elicited no reply whatever, I am led to 

 consider them MS. names. Colour is lent to this view by the fact that the 

 list was f(jrmerly longer and embraced tliose species brpuj^ht forward by him 

 in the Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. Journal, late in 1909. These sixteen ipecies 

 are : — Pimjila marci, Fimpla litigiosa, Pimpla asiatica, Ejihialtcs iridipennis, 

 Teffona (n.n.) rufpes, ]S'otha7nia {n.n.) bicarmata, Anomalon Icptogaster, Cam- 

 poplex indicus, CctfUjMplex zonutui^, Cumpoplex hiiujhauii, Campoplex reticulatus, 

 Limnerium louyiventre, Llmncriuvi a/ninl/pes (uec Cress.), Limncrium collbiuiii 

 Limnerium clypealis, and Limnerium atratum. 



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