6 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. ix 



LITERATURE QUOTED: 



Banks, N. 1905. A Revision of the Nearctic Hemerobiidae. Trans. 



Am. Ent. Soc. 32:21-51. 



Hagen, H. 1861. Synopsis of the Neuroptera of North America. Smith- 



sonian Miscellaneous Collections, 4:1-347. 



Needham, J. G. 1901. Aquatic Insects in the Adirondacks. New York 

 State Mus. Bull. 47, p. 551. 



EXPI.ANATION OF PLATE I: 



Fig. 1. Dorsal view of larva of Polystcechotes punctatus drawn from recently- 

 hatched specimen. 

 Fig. 2. Third leg of larva. 

 Fig. 3. Dorsal view of right larval antenna. 

 Fig. 4. Outline drawing of egg. 

 Fig. 5. Dorsal view of left mandible of larva. 



The Early French Coleopterlsts. 



By R. p. Dow, Brooklyn, N. Y. 



It does not follow that, because scientific France accepted 

 at once the "System of Nature" of Linne, French study of 

 zoological classification was begun through the influence of that 

 master. European revival of learning first traveled from Italy 

 to France. The study of insects kept pace with all other branches. 

 A volume of Aristotle in Latin, "De Animalibus," was pub- 

 lished in Paris in 1548. The very fact that it is not particularly 

 rare in old book stores proves that the edition was not small 

 and that the readers were many. A number of editions of 

 Pliny's Natural History were in print a few decades earlier or 

 later. Entomology, as a distinct subject, had been taught in 

 the Arab Universities as early as 1300, and at a number of 

 European Universities by 1650. The forerunners of the idea of a 

 natural classification were busy by the middle of the Seventeenth 

 Century. The first great work on the subject was by Johann 

 Swammerdamm, an Amsterdam physician, a General History of 

 Insects, with forty-three plates of excellent drawings, published 

 in 1669 when the author was thirty-two years old. There are 

 no less than nine editions of this work, in Latin, French, German, 

 Dutch and English. It was republished in Paris in 1758. More- 

 over it created a school at Amsterdam, from which Reaumur, 

 Ray and Linne himself got their early lessons and from the 

 publications of which Linne described many species, especially 

 of Dutch West Indian material. 



