In 1903, I published in the 27th Annual Report of the Indiana Geological 
and Natural Resources Survey a paper of 350 pages on Indiana Orthoptera 
which included keys, descriptions and full notes on habits of all the species 
known in the State. This gave Indiana students interested in the group a 
single work with which they could identify and arrange their specimens, 
something that I had long desired for my own use but which was not extant 
and therefore not available to me. After that time, for a dozen or more 
years, I gave my attention to Coleoptera and did little along Orthopteran 
lines. 
Since 1910 I haxe spent eight winters in Florida and while there have 
collected such Coleoptera, Orthoptera and Heteroptera as I could find at 
that season. My captures there between October 25 and April 15—the ear- 
liest and latest dates which I have been in the State—aggregate about 1,500 
species of Coleoptera, 150 of Orthoptera and perhaps 400 of Hemiptera- 
Heteroptera, the last named group as yet not studied or even in great part 
mounted. 
During the last ten years the study of Entomology has become one of the 
most, if not the most important among the different divisions of Zoology— 
this in great part due to its economic phases, its bearing upon the produc- 
tion of food, and therefore upon that of the H. C. L.. Among injurious in- 
sects the Orthoptera take high rank. The economic entomologist, in study- 
ing the life history, food habits and other facts regarding any insect, and 
in devising methods for its eradication, and putting them before the public, 
must have a handle, a scientific name for it. He cannot call it as he would 
aman, John Jones of Smithville, Ind., and let it go at that, but must call it 
by its correct scientific handle, so that other entomologists, the world over, 
may know with just what species he is dealing. Our present knowledge of 
the Orthoptera of the eastern United States is scattered throughout hun- 
dreds of papers, the majority of them out of print and difficult to obtain. 
The economic entomologist is in need of a single work—a manual of Or- 
thoptera which will give him this knowledge. 
Being out of a job and realizing the truth of the old adage that “An 
idle brain is the devil’s workshop,” or, if not that, the “‘workshop of a soul 
of discontent,’ I saw this need and three years and more ago began the 
preparation of a work in which all species of Orthoptera known from the 
United States east of the Mississippi River or from Canada east of the 90th 
meridian, are treated in detail, with full diagnoses of families, tribes and 
genera, keys to and descriptions of all species, distribution, habits, ete., ete. 
Many of the 353 species and 58 varieties or races recognized from the terri- 
tory covered, occur of course in the region west of the Mississippi—but there 
had to be a ‘“dead-line’” somewhere, and that stream furnished the one 
most available. 
Of the more than 400 forms treated, I have collected personally in the 
field 307. and have seen or studied either in my own collection or else- 
where, all but five, so that the work is based principally upon first-hand 
knowledge. The 58 varieties are, for the most part, treated as species 
by other writers, but my field work, taken in connection with my ideas of 
