1914] Van Duzee—Mr. Crawford's Recent Work on the Delphacine 163 
MR. CRAWFORD’S RECENT WORK ON THE 
DELPHACIN4:! 
By E. P. Van Dvuzez, 
University of California, Berkeley, Cala. 
Mr. Crawford has given us a considerable contribution to our 
knowledge of the Delphacinee of America north of Mexico in which 
he has described one genus and twenty species as new to our fauna 
and in addition has given us a fair insight into the Delphacid- 
fauna of Central and South America. There is a carefully pre- 
pared key to the genera, in part founded on characters not before 
used for this purpose. Chief among these is the use of the post- 
tibial spur. The author has disregarded the pronotal carine in 
his classification of the genera, as a character difficult to appreciate, 
but uses those of the vertex and frons which are often still more 
obscure. In spite of all the objections that have been raised 
against the use of these pronotal carine in the classification 
of this group it still seems to me that they form a character of 
prime importance in discriminating the genera. There certainly 
are very few species in which their form cannot readily be made 
out, much more easily in fact than the form of the tibial spurs, 
and it seems hardly likely that they would ever separate otherwise 
closely related species. His discarding of this and other equally 
useful characters has led to his lumping several readily separable 
genera: three under Dicranotropis and six under Megamelus. 
These will be referred to later. A hasty glance over the paper 
shows that three genera and over forty described species were 
unknown to him in nature out of a total of fifteen genera and 
about one hundred species recorded from north of Mexico, a 
relatively large number which leads one to fear there may be some 
duplication among his twenty new species. 
For one I cannot follow Kirkaldy, as Crawford has done, in 
giving the Delphacine family rank. It seems much better to 
continue the divisions of the old family Fulgoride as subfamilies, 
at least until some competent student has worked out the classi- 
1A contribution toward a monograph of the Homopterous insects of the family Delpha- 
cide of North and South America. From Proce. U.S. Nat. Mus., Vol. 46, pp. 557-640, 1914. 
