Oct., 'o6] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 273 



Charles Robert v* d. Osten Sacken* 

 By C. W. Johnson. 



Baron Osten Sacken was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, 

 August 21, 1828, and died at Heidelberg, Germany, May 20, 

 1906. Educated in St. Petersburg, he entered into the service 

 of the Imperial Office in 1849. I* 1 ^56 he was appointed 

 Secretary of Legation in Washington, and in 1862 Consul 

 General of Russia in New York. Resigning in 1871, he 

 returned to Europe, and in the autumn of 1873 revisited the 

 United States, remaining until 1877, having been a resident of 

 this country for twenty-one years. 



At the early age of eleven he began to take an interest in 

 entomology, his first paper appearing in 1854, "Proposal for a 

 new classification of the Tipulidae brevipalpi," based upon a 

 detailed study of their male genital organs." These ideas were 

 later incorporated in his paper on "New genera and species of 

 North American Tipulidae," etc., in i860, and in his "Mono- 

 graph on the North American Tipulidae," in 1869. Additional 

 notes on this family appeared in 1886-87 under the title 

 "Studies on Tipulidae." In 1858 Osten Sacken published the 

 first catalogue of North American Diptera. This work was fol- 

 lowed by that laborious and thankless task, the translating and 

 editing of Loew's manuscript of his three monographs; the 

 first appearing in 1862, the second in 1864, and the third, after 

 an unaccountable delay on Loew's part, in 1872. Before the 

 publication of his own monograph on the tipulidae (part iv) 

 the original manuscript was destroyed by a fire which occurred 

 at Smithsonian Institution, January 24, 1865, and had to be 

 rewritten, the volume not appearing until January, 1869. In 

 recently referring to this matter, which is not mentioned in the 

 monograph, he says : "The loss did not, in the end, turn out 

 to be a loss to science. During a journey to Europe which I 

 undertook soon after it had happened, I gained a great deal 

 of information in the museums I visited that proved a benefit 

 to the work when I reproduced it." Following the work on 

 the monographs, his principal publications were: "Prodrome 

 of a Monograph of the North American Tabanidae," 1875; 



