Colt Bs) 
worthy of their scientific renown; so that, even if it can be 
said that the Society is too much controlled by lepidopterists, 
it must at the same time be allowed that the activity of 
workers in this most attractive branch of Entomology is not 
confined to our ‘ Transactions.’ 
On the Continent a similar activity prevails. The Grand 
Duke Nicolas Mikhailovitch, aided by several energetic 
workers, continues to publish and liberally distribute his 
splendid Memoires. 
M. Charles Oberthiir has now reached the 18th Livraison 
of ‘Etudes Entomologiques,’ and though he has introduced 
in the last part of it some of the least euphonious and most 
barbarous sounding specific names I have ever heard of, has 
beautiful illustrations in the best style of French art. 
The veteran Dr. Staudinger devotes every moment which his 
health will allow him to give to the completion of the third and 
anxiously-awaited edition of his Catalogue of the Lepidoptera 
of the European Fauna, and the additions to this fauna have 
been so numerous in the twenty-three years which have 
elapsed since the last Catalogue was published that we may 
expect it to be of the highest interest when published, as it 
is based, like the last one, on perhaps the most complete and 
carefully studied collection which has ever been formed in any 
branch of natural history. 
Our new honorary member’s revision of the System of 
Orthoptera in the Annals of the Genoa Museum is a most 
valuable aud excellent piece of work, and the first volume of 
the new catalogue of Hemiptera by Lethierry and Severin is 
also very valuable. I am not aware that anything of first- 
rate importance has been published on the anatomy, physi- 
ology, or embryology of insects, but Miiller’s pamphlet on 
the fungi cultivated by ants is said to be an interesting work. 
And now I wish to ¢all your attention to a subject of great 
and rapidly increasing difficulty, which applies perhaps more 
strongly to entomological than to ornithological or botanical 
work. It is the rapid increase of the number of short notes, 
descriptions, and papers on Hntomology, and the great num- 
ber of periodicals in which they are published. 
