A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF THE 

 ICHNEUMONIDAE. 



GEOLOGICAL TIMES. 



The first appearance of the Insecta is in the carboniferous measures of 

 the Palaeozoic epoch, and they are further represented in the Mesozoic 

 Lias and Oohtic groups.^ Insects of the present family cannot, however, 

 he traced back further than the formations in which they are associated with 

 the gnats and flies of most of the recent families, as well as the ants and 

 bees and a few Lepidoptera. Considering their economy, they were 

 probably not introduced much before the last Order,^ though it is, I con- 

 ceive, very far from impossible that they were originally fossorial, becoming 

 entomophagous in the course of evolution. The discovery of the earliest 

 forms of Ichneumonidae appears to have been at Aix, in 1829, when Sir 

 Roderick Murchison ^ and Sir Charles Lyell formed a collection of fossil 

 insects from the Upper Eocene system, which also comprised genera 

 of the Tenthredinidae, Eormicidae, Vespidae and Chalcididae. In the 

 middle Miocene beds of the marls, of Radoboj, in Croatia,* were discovered 

 eighty-five species of Hymenoptera, of which twenty-two appertained to 

 the Ichneumonidae, and the remainder to the Eormicidae, Vespidae, 

 Apidae and Sphegidae. Upwards of 5,000 specimens of insects have 

 been obtained from the celebrated Upper Miocene lacustrine formation, of 

 CEningen, in the Rhine Valley ; the great majority of the Hymenoptera 

 being distributed among the Ichneumonidae, Eormicidae and Apidae. 

 Erom the Tertiary strata of the United States, also, Ichneumonidae, 

 Eormicidae and Chalcididae have been described.^ During Pliocene and 

 post-Tertiary times, no remains of Hymenoptera have been discovered ; 

 not, probably, because they did not exist, but because the conditions 

 under which these formations were compiled were unfavourable to their 

 preservation, reducing them to comminuted fragments to such an extent 

 that the most chitinous parts of Coleoptera, Hemiptera and Orthoptera 

 alone survived.^ 



PRE-LINNEAN TIMES. 



Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the (keat, is said, by Strack,^ to have 

 applied the name Ichneumon not at all to the insects which now-a-days 

 bear it, but to the Eossorial Hymeno[)tera^ ; and Bcrthoumieu tells us he 



1 C/. Lyell. Klements of Geology, pp. 387, 396, 586, &c. 



2 Parfitt. Trans. Devon. Assoc. 1881, p. 2. 



8 C/. Edinburgh New Pliil. Journ. October, 1829, pp. 287-297. 



■• C/. Prof. Hecr. Vie Insectenfanna der Tertiargebilde, &c. 



6 C/. Scudder. Geolosical and Geographical Survey of United States. 1880. 



" Goss. The Geological Antiquity of Insects. 1880. 



^ Aristoteles Natnrgeschichte dcr Thiero. 18 6. 



" Quoted by Caius Plinius Secundus. Historia Mundi. 



