British Elateridce. 11 



faith in any collection, but to refer to standard books. For my 

 own part, if a specimen in any collection, however celebrated, 

 does not agree essentially with the author's printed description, I 

 totally disregard it. I make no exceptions, being justified by my 

 own experience of many years, as will be evident from the fol- 

 lowing facts. 



The Banksian collection of insects, named by Fabricius, was in 

 such a state of confusion when bequeathed to the Linnaean Society, 

 that some twenty years since the late Mr. C.T. Bennett, Mr. Vigors 

 and iMr. Haworth undertook, with the volumes of Fabricius before 

 them, to correct the nomenclature, assigning to each specimen the 

 name it was believed that Fabricius had given it — by no means an 

 easy task, where many must have been lost and others added. 

 Since then the specimens have got mouldy and have been cleaned, 

 which with the greatest care cannot fail to lead to alterations, to 

 say nothing of unavoidable accidents. 



When I went to see Mr. Marsham's collection before his death, 

 I found it in the possession of a naval officer, who kept it clean 

 by reversing the drawers and rapping the bottoms, by which 

 process heads, trunks and entire insects fell upon the floor, and 

 numbers of labels were changed or lost, or, what was worse, quite 

 different things were eventually substituted to replace them. 

 During my visit I picked up and restored to the drawers no in- 

 considerable number of specimens. 



And even Mr. Kirby's collection of British insects was entirely 

 neglected long before he presented it to the Entomological Society, 

 owing in a great measure to his attention being devoted to exotic 

 Entomology : he was also much in want of more drawers, and, to 

 make room for Captain Hancock's fine ColeojHera from Brazil, 

 Mr. Kirby took out his entire collection of bees, so that when I 

 visited him at Barham in 1817 it was stuck on sheets of cork and 

 mounted on the top of a book-case, covered with dust and muti- 

 lated by the larvas of moths and spiders; and had I not volunteered 

 to clean the specimens and place them in security, that interesting 

 collection would never have reached its present destination — it 

 must have perished in a few months ! As it was, many of the 

 typical specimens were destroyed, and it was necessary to transfer 

 the labels to duplicate specimens, whenever they could be found. 



From this digression I will return to the Elatcrs. Having 

 purchased Mr. Charles Griesbach's Cabinet o{ Coleoplera, I found 

 it very rich in Elaters, and amongst them one quite new to me; 

 and wishing to give a figure of it in my "British Entomology," I 

 began to search for its name, and as it appeared to be the Elatcr 



