INTRODUCTION 



LOWER CALIFORNIA 



The peninsula of Lower California, or, to use its Spanish name, Baja 

 California, is a long, slender land finger extending southward for nearly 

 eight hundred miles from its junction with the continent of North America. 

 Its southern extremity, terminating in Cape San Lucas, lies just within the 

 tropics two hundred miles across the Gulf of California from the mainland 

 of Mexico, of which the peninsula is politically a part. It is, in the main, 

 an isolated land whose scanty population clusters about the crumbling 

 missions that stand as symbols of a romantic past through which there 

 moves a procession of priests, pirates, and filibusters succeeded by long 

 years in which the land was virtually forgotten. 



It is withal a land to fire the interest of the scientific explorer, 

 especially of the botanist, for its isolation and its climate have combined 

 to develop what has been characterized as the strangest desert flora in 

 the world. Yet until comparatively recent years but little has been known 

 concerning the biota of the peninsula. The existing knowledge is based 

 largely upon the explorations made by Dr. Gustav Eisen under the 

 auspices of the California Academy of Sciences, and by Mr. T. S. 

 Brandegee during the closing years of the past century, the results of the 

 extended travels of Nelson and Goldman, supported by the Bureau of 

 Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture, having 

 for the most part not yet been made public. 



In certain fields enough work has been done to give a reasonably 

 clear conception of the nature of the life of the peninsula, but there 

 remain some groups that have been practically untouched. Among these 

 groups are the insects. Rather extensive entomological collections were 

 made by Dr. Eisen in the southern portion of the peninsula, the region to 

 which scientific writers have applied the name "Cape Region," but even 

 here practically no more than a beginning has been made. Throughout 

 the remainder of the area almost no work at all has been done and con- 

 cerning certain groups there is no information whatsoever. From all this 

 great area, as far as I am able to determine, not a single species of the 

 Coccidae or scale insects has heretofore been recorded, although the 

 richness of the flora is in itself evidence that this group should be well 

 represented. A few species have been taken from Carmen Island in the 

 Gulf of California, but none from the peninsula itself. 



