i 
figures of new butterflies and moths, the two Felders have con- 
ferred a benefit upon Entomology which will not soon be forgotten; 
and, in the early death of the younger, we have lost one of our 
most earnest and most enlightened students of the fascinating but 
difficult order of Lepidoptera. 
Victor von Motschulsky died at Simferopol on June 5th, 1871. 
He was a colonel on the staff of the Russian army, and made very 
extensive journeys in an official capacity to the remotest parts of 
the vast Russian Empire, as well as to other countries. His first 
important work, published more than twenty years ago in the 
Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Peters- 
burgh, was on the Coleoptera of Siberia, describing hosts of new 
species of Geodephaga, with exact localities. He afterwards 
published a large work entitled ‘Die Kifer Russlands.’ His 
‘Etudes Entomologiques’ formed a miscellaneous record of his 
travels and adventures in the Caucasus, Central and North 
America, and other countries, and contained descriptions of great 
numbers of new species. He also described and catalogued the 
Coleoptera collected by various travellers in the Amur and in 
Central Asia, and published several memoirs on the Coleoptera of 
California. Of late years he wrote chiefly in the well-known 
Moscow ‘ Bulletin,’ monographing various groups of Coleoptera 
and describing large numbers of new genera and species. I am 
informed by Mr. Bates (to whom I am indebted for most of the 
foregoing information) that Motschulsky has a reputation for 
carelessness and inaccuracy, for recklessness in introducing new 
classifications, and for ignoring the works of his predecessors. 
His genera and other new groups are often unintelligible; and it 
is therefore not improbable that his great labours as an author 
have been on the whole of more injury than benefit to the science 
to which he devoted himself. Although almost exclusively a 
Coleopterist, he also described many Lepidoptera. 
Professor J. T. C. Ratzeburg died at Berlin on the 24th of 
October last, in his seventy-first year. He occupied himself 
especially with the metamorphoses and the ravages of insects 
injurious to forests, and his great work ‘ Die Forstinsekten’ is a 
lasting proof of his industry and keen powers of observation. 
He also published a popular edition of this work, as well as the 
portion relating to the parasitic Hymenoptera (which play so 
important a part in checking the ravages of forest insects), in a 
