190 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 
Notes on the Tipulide of the Glasgow District. 
By Grorce W. Orp. 
[Read 28th September, 1897. ] 
THE following list of Tipulide, collected in the West of Scotland 
during the present summer by Mr. Robert Henderson, of the 
Andersonian Naturalists’ Society, and myself, must necessarily 
very imperfectly represent the number and distribution of the 
species in the district, and it is with some hesitation that we 
present it at all. 
The Diptera have been very much neglected by British ento- 
mologists. In Scotland matters in this respect are even worse 
than they are in England. Mr. Verrall, the most prominent 
English authority on the Diptera, published in the Hntomologists’ 
Monthly Magazine (Vols. XXIII, XXIV., XXV.) “A List of 
British Tipulide,” giving tables for the identification of all the 
genera, and of the species of the principal genera. Mr, P. H. 
Grimshaw, of the Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh, to 
whom I am much indebted, advised me to get Vol. II. of Schiner’s 
Fauna Austriaca (Diptera), and the minute descriptions of species 
in that splendid work have, in the majority of cases, removed 
all the doubts we may have had as to the correctness of our 
identifications. A number of species still remains to which we 
have been unable to assign positively any specific name, and these 
we have been compelled to leave over for further study, and in 
the hope of obtaining fresh specimens next year. 
Of those included in the list, only in regard to the species of the 
genus Molophilus, and to one or two species of Tipula, is there 
any uncertainty, and of these we can only say, as Mr. Verrall says 
of many of the species in his list, ‘‘ we believe we have them,” 
All systems of classification are more or less artificial. I cannot 
see that the modern method of classifying by the neuration of 
the wings is less artificial than its predecessors. The neuration 
exhibited by any single species is by no means constant, as often the 
two wings of the same insect exhibit striking differences. The 
