32 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



imperfectly understood — even yet the position of the 

 group among insects is but provisionally established (see 

 ftostea), and the knowledge of the life history is strangely 

 incomplete. 



In America, besides some account of the commoner 

 forms infesting domestic birds and mammals included in 

 Professor Herbert Osborn's " The Pediculi and Mallo- 

 phaga affecting Man and the Lower Animals " (Bull. No. 7, 

 1891, Div. of Ent., U. S. Dept. Agric), and a discussion 

 by Prof. A. S. Packard (Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc, 1887, 

 vol. xxiv) of the position of the. group among insects, 

 practically nothing touching the systematic consideration 

 of the group has been published. 



Historical and Bibliographical. 



European. — The Mallophaga are first recognizably 

 mentioned in the writings of Redi (1668 and 1686), 

 where the common Trinoton luridum of the ducks. may 

 be recognized in his "louse of the teal," and the com- 

 mon Lificurus bacillus of the pigeons is evidently the 

 subject of his description of "Pulex columbce major is. " 

 In the various writings of Albin (1720), Otto Fabricius 

 (1780), J. C. Fabricius (1781, 1787, 1805), De Geer 

 (1778), Linne (1746, 1789), Scopoli (1763), Schrank 

 (1776, 1781, 1804), Panzer (1793), and others, curious 

 accounts and brief descriptions of the common Mallo- 

 phaga are to be found. 



It is to the writings of Christian Ludwig Nitzsch, Pro- 

 fessor of Zoology in the University of Halle, in the suc- 

 ceeding century, however, that we turn for a definite me- 

 moir which may be recognized as a real beginning of the 

 systematic study of the Mallophaga. Nitzsch's " Die 

 Familien und Gattungen der Thierinsekten (Insecta Epi- 

 zoica) als ein Prodromus Naturgeshichte derselben," 



