"I— STUDIES IN THE RHYNCHOPHOROUS 



SUBFAMILY BARIN.E OF THE 



BRAZILIAN FAUNA. 



It. is now many years since the late Mr. Herbert H. Smith returned 

 from Brazil with a large collection of the Insecta, made by him 

 and his capable wife in several parts of that country, and more 

 especially in the diamond regions near Chapada, in Matto Grosso. 

 It happily fell to my good fortune to secure what he brought back 

 in the large subfamily Barinae, the nearctic components of which I 

 had shortly before revised systematically, and in which I therefore 

 had special interest. Besides Chapada, there were several other 

 sections of Brazil that had contributed to the material brought 

 together by that skilfull collector, notably Santarem, on the Ama- 

 zon, and Rio de Janeiro, with a few from Entre Rios, in the back 

 country within one hundred miles of the latter city. Afterwards I 

 received from M. Desbrochers des Loges, a large lot in rather poor 

 state of preservation and deficient in records of locality, which I 

 added to the material of Mr. Smith, carefully remounting all 

 received from both sources and filing it away in my general collec- 

 tion, where it remained untouched for twenty-five years or more, 

 until the present opportunity permitted me to undertake the serious 

 and prolonged labor involved in a tentative systematic exposition 

 of it — with what success it seems difficult to foretell, for the simple 

 reason that it has been impossible to identify species very surely 

 from the epochal work of Schonherr and, what is still more impor- 

 tant, because of my inability to consult the type material previously 

 published. So the present work must be regarded merely as an 

 attempt to describe the material of the Smith collection, which, 

 though large and important as it is, by no means does justice to the 

 enormous Barid fauna of Brazil, the extensive regions between Rio 

 de Janeiro and Para, as well as the upper Amazons, being virtually 

 unrepresented. The deficiency of this material may very well be 

 inferred, indeed, by the absence of representatives of many of the 

 genera published by Schonherr, Lacordaire and Pascoe, even typical 

 Centrinus itself being unknown to me. Several of these unrecog- 

 nized genera are mentioned under the Madopterini. A few species 

 from the Central American region, Colombia, Argentina and other 

 parts, are included incidentally. 



In defining the genera, the chief structural characters employed 

 in the present preliminary work are those relating to the rostrum 

 or beak, mandibles, antennae, presternum and its posterior pro- 

 T. L. Casey, Mem. Col. X, Aug. 1922. 



