ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 
PHILADELPHIA, PA., May, 1914. 
The Desirability of a Bibliographical Dictionary of 
Entomologists*. 
Fifteen years ago, in locating and studying Burmeister’s 
types of Odonata, it was desirable, as it is in all similar pieces 
of work, to ascertain the sources from which he had obtained 
his material, the original collectors, and the dates of the col- 
lecting, the successive owners into whose hands the specimens 
had passed and their fate subsequent to their examination and 
description by Burmeister... Such of this information as was 
obtained came after a protracted search through the few early 
references afforded by Hagen’s Bibliotheca Entomologica 
and by papers by authors later than Burmeister which treated 
of any of the species included in his Handbuch of 1839. 
Five years ago, in preparing an annotated list of the locali- 
ties and collectors of Odonata in Mexico and Central America, 
for the introduction to the Neuroptera volume of the Biologia 
Centrali-Americana, no precise information was acquired as 
to the parts of those countries visited by such men as Deppe 
or McNiel, and even in the case of de Saussure it was not 
complete. 
It is not only as to collectors and fate of collected material 
that data are often needed. It is frequently highly desirable 
‘to know when, where and under what conditions the describ- 
ers, the monographers, the systematists did their work, since 
such information throws light, in many cases, on the results 
of their labors and on the views which they adopted. At this 
present time we wish to know something of the personal his- 
tory of Brackenridge Clemens, a pioneer in the study of the 
*Read at the Atlanta meeting of the Entomological Society of 
America, December 30, 1913. 
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