xliv INTRODUCTION. 



Ichneumonidae are recorded as being at that time known to inhabit these 

 Islands. His descriptions are a decided improvement on those of the first 

 period, though his terminology is often a little obscure. He might have 

 advantageously quoted more fuily from the Continental authors, and it is 

 to be especially regretted that he was not cognizant with Holmgren's 

 excellent Monographia Tryphonidum. Desvignes also contributed descrip- 

 tions of several supposedly new species to the Trans. Ent. Soc, 1850-64, 

 and to the E.M.M., in 1868. Rev. T. A. Marshall's 1870 Catalogus bears 

 the print of the master systematist and sounds the knell of the superficial 

 work of the middle period. It very greatly augments the number of 

 British species and enumerates one hundred and thirty-five indigenous 

 genera, accepting and tabulating all the most recent Continental researches. 

 The same author, to a very great extent, removed, in 1872, one of the 

 primary difficulties of our study, that of its cumbrous synonymy, in his 

 Catalogue of Hymenoptera, published by the Entomological Society. 

 This has remained till the present day, though now sadly obsolete, the 

 standard list of the British Ichneumonidae, comprising 1,186 species, 

 distributed through 136 genera. It lent so strong a stimulus to hymenop- 

 terists as to give rise, not only to a multiplicity of notes, records and 

 descriptions, by Marshall, Parfitt, Capron, Bignell, Hellins, Bairstow, 

 Wilson and others, in our serials, but was the corner stone to the beginnings 

 of a capital annotated synopsis of the British species, by Bridgman and 

 Fitch, in the Entomologist, of 1880-85, which, unfortunately, like its 

 predecessor of 1835, was never completed, terminating abruptly in the 

 middle of the Ophioninae, with only the Ichneumoninae and Cryptinae 

 tabulated. Since that time nothing of importance has appeared, with 

 the exception of Bridgman's annual Additions, in i88r, and Further 

 Additions to Mr. Marshall's Catalogue of British Ichneumonidae, in 

 1882-89. These and all other additions I could find were incorporated 

 in a paper read before the Entomological Society of Eondon, on 6th 

 March, 1901, in which were enumerated 1,719 species, comprised in 154 

 genera, of British Ichneumonidae, which is the total of those recorded from, 

 though by no means of those which occur in, these Islands. 



CLASSIFICATION. 



Order. HYMENOPTERA. 



Since 1669, when Swammerdam attempted to erect a system of the 

 Insecta, based solely upon their metamorphoses, to the appearance of 

 Ashmead's Classification of the Ichneumon Flies, in 1900,^ men of 

 science have striven after a natural and convenient grouping of the mass 

 of families, genera and species into which the Hymenoptera have gradually 

 become divided ; and it indeed seems strange that no perfectly natural 

 order has yet been enunciated, when we find that, as early as the end of 

 the seventeenth century, Ray had already grouped this mass much as we 

 to-day recognise it.'-^ Saunders, in his recent work on the British Aculeata, 

 makes no reference to the relative position of this Order in the scale 

 of Nature, which was doubtless unnecessary in so compact and highly 



1 Proc. U.S. Nat. Museum, xxiii., pp. 1-220. 2 See p. xl., ante. 



