ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 



Philadelphia, Pa., March, 1920. 



A FIFTY YEARS EDITORSHIP AND ARTHROPODS. 



It is always a good thing for the entomologist to look out- 

 side his own subject and its special literature if with no other 

 hope than that of obtaining some new ideas with which to 

 illuminate his own studies. The Quarterly Journal of Micros- 

 copical Science (London) for October, 1919, contains an article 

 by one of its cooperating editors on " Fifty Years of the 'Quar- 

 terly Journal of Microscopical Science,' under the Editor- 

 ship of Sir E. Ray Lankester." In it a brief sketch of the 

 foundation of the Journal in 1853, with Dr. Edwin Lankester 

 as one of its editors, is given. "In 1869 E. Ray Lankester, 

 then a newly graduated B. A. of Oxford, joined his father in 

 the editorship" and became chief editor in 1872. The most 

 important articles in various biological fields which have ap- 

 peared in the Journal are enumerated, as, for example, "the 

 extremely interesting memoirs on the natural history of Ter- 

 mites by Grassi and Sandias in 1896 and 1897," translations, 

 however, from publications in the Italian. It would appear 

 from this list that contributions on the insects have not been 

 so numerous or important to receive much attention. But 

 there is this paragraph: 



The series of articles by Sir Ray Lankester, beginning in vol. 21. (1881) 

 with the memoir, "Limulus an Arachnid" are now among the classics of 

 zoological literature, and to this day stand as an example ot the way in 

 which a morphological problem may be followed up in detail by critical 

 analysis of every organ in the bodies of the animals brought into compari- 

 son. The paper on the minute structure of the lateral and central eyes 

 of Scorpio and Limulus was written in conjunction with A. G. Bourne, and 

 marks a great advance in our knowledge of the structure and genesis of 

 the Arthropod eye. In later years (vol. 48, 1904) these memoirs were 

 summed up and extended in a masterly review of the structure and classi- 

 fication of the Arachnida. As a parallel piece of research we may notice 

 Lankester 's illuminating memoir, "Observations and Reflections on the 

 Appendages of Apus cancriformis, vol. 21 (188 1), followed by P. Pelseneer's 

 more detailed study of the same species (vol. 25, 1885), and the whole sub- 



83 



