Rev. F. I). Morice's Notes on Australian Sawflies. 307 



The Sawflies of very few Regions have been collected and 

 studied to any considerable extent, and the known species 

 of any other are probably a very small fraction of thoss 

 actually existing there. This is especially true of South 

 America, except a few particular districts, and also of the 

 Oriental Region. For instance, up to December 1911 only 

 eight species representing seven genera of Sawflies (includ- 

 ing the Siricidae) had been recorded from Java; and then, 

 all at once, the captures made by a single Dutch collector 

 in one visit to the island doubled the number of its known 

 genera and brought that of its known species up to twenty. 

 It is also a significant fact that this collector's captures 

 included only one species that had been recorded from 

 Java before ! {vide Enslin in Tijdsch. v. Ent. IN. 1912, 

 j). 104). I have already alluded to another difficulty in 

 dealing with our present subject, namely, the want of any 

 palaeontological evidence as to the former range of any par- 

 ticular group. Without such evidence, as has been remarked 

 by Lydekker, many facts as to the present distribution of 

 Mammals would have been incapable of explanation. And 

 it seems only too probable that for lack of it many of the 

 points on which I have ventured to speculate must always 

 remain unsettled. 



Note 2. — On Sawflies in general. The Characteristics of the 

 Sub-order, and the Groups included in it. 



The Sawflies, if that word be used in its widest sense, are 

 a primary division (Sub-order) of the Order Hymenoptera 

 distinguishable from all its other Sub-orders by at least 

 two very definite and obvious differences, one in the struc- 

 ture of the imago, and another in that of the larva. In 

 neither case has this difference been developed within the 

 Sub-order itself. What has really happened, on the con- 

 trary, is that, whereas all the imagines of other Hymeno- 

 pterous groups have developed a character unknown in any 

 other Order, and all their larvae have lost a character which 

 seems to have been formerly universal in the Class Insecta, 

 the Sawflies, both as imagines and as larvae, have remained 

 true to the original type. A similar primitiveness. or 

 conservatism, may be noticed in other characters of the Sub- 

 order, especially in the venation of their wings, which *as 

 compared with that of all ot her Hymenoptera is remarkably 

 " generalised." There is, on the whole, much more uni- 



