BULLETIN ^ 



OF THE 



BROOKLYN ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



Vol. XI February, 1916 No. i 



A LIST OF THE FAMILIES OF COLEOPTERA IN AMERICA, 

 NORTH OF MEXICO. 



By Charles W. Leng, 33 Murray St., N. Y. City. 



The following list is based on the work of Brues and Melander 

 ("Key to the Families of North American Insects," 1915), with 

 some corrections, the authorities for which are given in the notes. 

 It is published at this time in the hope of ehciting such comment 

 from the students of the Coleoptera that, in the event of a new 

 Check List being published, the materials for a satisfactory ar- 

 rangement of the families, after free discussion by those inter- 

 ested, may be available. It may be added that the work on which 

 the list is based, for which we are most grateful to the authors, 

 gives the definition of the family names employed, and is stated 

 to be in turn based on the works of Sharp and Ganglbaur ; and 

 that it coincides, in the main, with the " Catalogus Coleopter- 

 rorum" of Junk, as far as that work has been completed. The 

 differences between its classification and that of Leconte and 

 Horn, repeated in Henshaw's Check List, are the result of the 

 studies during the last forty years of a host of Coleopterists, 

 who have corrected conclusions derived by Leconte, mainly from 

 consideration of the external adult characters, by studies of the 

 larvae in some families and by studies of the fossil insects in 

 others; as well as by studies in some groups of the internal 

 anatomy. The differences are not always very great, consisting 

 often in treating Leconte's subfamilies as families or vice versa, 

 or in changes in the relative position of the families. Of such 

 changes in position, the greatest is in according the highest rank 

 to the beetles with lamellate antennae, a course which most 



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