128 DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



drawn from lists of various writers, chiefly Schwarz, Bowditch, Put- 

 nam, Packard, and Cockerell, while the New Jersey ones come from 

 the list of Smith. Dr. Hamilton has lately printed valuable compiled 

 catalogues of Alaskan and circumpolar Coleoptera, which have been 

 used freely and proved very helpful. In addition to the above, all 

 the extensive faunal lists published in this country have been gone 

 over, as well as most of the smaller ones, and nearly all of the mono- 

 graphic or synoptic works of systematists. It is, therefore, hoped that 

 with the addition of many hitherto unpublished data derived from my 

 own collection, a fair idea may be had of the distribution in this 

 country of the species mentioned in this report. It is, however, a 

 most unfortunate fact that there are immense stretches of country, 

 even in thickly-settled districts, from which we have literally no in- 

 formation except shreds scattered through descriptive papers, and 

 every collection of any size must, without doubt, hold much that is 

 new to us in the way of distributional data. 



The time for an accurate map of the faunal regions of the continent 

 has not yet come — nor will it before another century at least of care- 

 ful investigation has enabled us to fix approximately the range of the 

 rarer forms of insect life. It is evident to any one who will read with 

 care and with some understanding of the general principles of distri- 

 bution, that many of the recent theories as to the division of our 

 country into "life-zones" have very little foundation in fact. If 

 better proof were wanting of this, we might point to that of authors 

 changing from year to year their arbitrary arrangement of our zoo- 

 geographical regions — uniting to-day two or three of those of older 

 authors, and separating them again a few months later on. All this 

 may or may not be progress, but it will all have to be gone over again 

 in the light of a wider knowledge than seems to be at present in the 

 possession of certain writers who cannot rest without having first 

 shown us that all previously conceived ideas are totally wrong, and 

 that their explanation of the distribution of life is the only plausible 

 one. A single group of animals may or may not indicate in a gen- 

 eral way the lines of distribution followed by a larger number — but it 

 is manifestly unreasonable to hope for a stable method of division of 

 a country into life-zones before the life of that country is well known. 



Local lists must form the basis of our work in this line for a long 

 time to come, and in this direction the present report is offered and 

 must here find its only value. For the sake of facilitating a compre- 

 hension of the affinities of the Bayfield fauna to certain others I have 



