—174— 



there is no danger that this fauna will become entirely extinct in Southern 

 Florida, since many spots covered with semitropical forest are situated in 

 the most inhospitable and inaccessible parts of the country which will 

 never have any attraction to the settler. 



One more question remains to be briefly toucheil, viz : What shall 

 we do with these colonies of seinitnipical insects in the south-western and 

 south-eastern extremities of our country ? Shall «e include them in the 

 lists of North American insects or shall we exclude them therefrom? 

 From the standpoint of systematic Fntomoloj^y it would no doubt be ad- 

 vantageous to include as much as possible or the whole of the semitrop- 

 ical faunas since the systematic position of many now isolated species, or 

 genera or higher groups could then be established in a much more satis- 

 factory way than it is possible h-om the study of the North American fauna 

 alone. Some of our authors, dealing with whole Orders of insects, have 

 indeed included this semitropical fauna, c. g. Dr. Hagen -in his 

 Synopsis of the Neuroptera of North Americn, Baron Osten-Sacken in 

 his Catalogue of Diptera, and Mr. Uhler in his Check List of Hemiptera. 

 These authors could do so, however, without much inconvenience since 

 the material at their command from Central America and the West Indies 

 was very limited as to the numlier of species. If they had now the im- 

 mense material from the continent of Central America that has been ac- 

 cumulated by the enterprise and energy of the editors of the " Biologia 

 Centrali-Americana" they would no longer include the Central American 

 fauna into a Monograph or Catalogue of North American insects, for the 

 the simple reason that the true North American fauna would then appear 

 as an insignificant appendix to the much richer fauna of the Semitropics. 

 The fauna of the West Indies is as yet but very imperfectly known ; but 

 it is safe to say that, although poorer than the Central American fauna, 

 the number of its species also exceeds that of the North American con- 

 tinent. 



This inclusion would, in Coleoptera alone, involve the addition of 

 at least 20,000 species. Our systematists would thus be utterly over- 

 whelmed by this abundance of material, and, moreover, after this in- 

 clusion we would be in the same trouble as before, since there is again 

 no dividing line between the Central American faunas and the adjacent 

 portions of the tropical fauna of South America. This inclusion is, there- 

 fore, impracticable but so is also a wholesale exclusion, for the reason 

 that the many semitropical species found along our south-western fronder 

 and the few species that were hitherto known of the West Indian colony 

 in Florida, have already been included into our own fauna, and it would 

 cause considerable confusion and inconvenience to exclude them again 

 from our lists and synopses. Moreover, a portion of these species have 



