4 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 



has given me specimens of several species which I had been un- 

 able to secure, and Mr, Nathan Banks has kindly examined the 

 collection at Cambridge for certain material and furnished 

 transcripts of several necessary descriptions not in my posses- 

 sion. Mr. Gerhard of the Field Museum made it possible for 

 me to spend several profitable hours in the examination of the 

 Strecker collection in that institution. To all of these men I 

 wish to express my gratitude for their valuable assistance. 



The first step toward a rational classification of the skippers 

 was made by Scudder in 1874 ^ when he proposed the division of 

 the family, as he regarded it, into two tribes, the Hesperides and 

 Astyci. These represented approximately the genera Thymele 

 and Pamphila of Fabricius' classification in Uliger's Magazine 

 in 1807. Scudder based his tribes on the secondary sexual char- 

 acters of the males and characters found in the early stages. 



This paper was followed in 1878 by Mabille's work on the 

 Hesperiidae in the Brussels museum.^ Mabille adopted the tribes 

 proposed by Scudder but subdivided them into several minor 

 groups each. Scudder later expressed his approval of these 

 divisions for the Hesperidi but reserved his judgment of the 

 Astyd.^ Many of Mabille's groups are not represented in our 

 fauna ; the others have been the subject of very little dispute. 



In the same year there appeared a paper by Burmeister * in 

 which the family is divided into four tribes. I am familiar with 

 this paper only through the remarks of Scudder in the Butter- 

 fles of New England, but these are quite sufficient to show that 

 none but historic interest attaches to the rather remarkable ar- 

 rangement proposed. 



A year after this Speyer produced a brief work ^ in Germany 

 wherein we find the first suggestion of the systematic importance 

 of the position of vein five of the primaries. This suggestion 

 furnished the necessary complement to Scudder 's foundation for 

 the major subdivisions of the skippers, which are still in use. 



Nothing further of importance was done in the systematic 



iBull. Buff. Soc. Nat. Hist, i, 195, 1874. 



2 Ann. Soc. Ent. Belg. xxi, 12, 1878. 



3 Butt. New Eng. u, 1372, 18. 



* Desc. Phys. Rep. Arg., Lep. 245, 1878. 

 " Stett. ent. Zeit. XL, 477, 1879. 



