296 Transactions.— Zoology. 
some mysterious reason, however, the “zoology” was never regularly published, 
and I believe that a single copy never found its way to this province. At any 
rate, I have made repeated inquiries and could never ascertain the existence of 
one here, though there may be some in the other provinces. Considering that 
this costly work was published at the imperial expense, with the intention of 
diffusing as widely as possible the information acquired during the voyage, it 
must betoken either great stinginess on the part of scientific authorities at 
home or great apathy on the part of those here, that we should have remained 
for so many years without a copy of it. Of course, a great many additional 
New Zealand species of Coleoptera have been described since 1846, but to give 
you some idea of the difficulty of tracing them, I may mention that some of 
our beetles have found their way into the hands of a Russian entomologist and 
that, owing to the unfortunate disuse of Latin, and the mania for “modern 
languages” which are now so fashionable, he has actually described them in 
Russian! Well might the president of the Entomological Society of London 
remark, in one of his recent addresses, “that if the practice of recording 
scientific information exclusively in the vernacular be persisted in, the thorough 
investigation of any family of insects, already extremely difficult, will soon 
become totally impossible.” Books alone, however, are not all that the 
working student requires, and having been long convinced of the necessity of 
procuring for the province such a typical collection as I have alluded to, I 
some years ago endeavoured to supply one for this purpose. 
I took with me when returning to England as good a collection of our 
insects as somewhat adverse circumstances had enabled me to get together, 
I intended to have had these properly named and classified in London, to 
have compared them with the types in the British Museum, and to have 
then sent them back to the colony. Unfortunately, this small collection 
was lost when the “Blue Jacket” was burnt, and all my efforts to replace 
it, by inducing my New Zealand friends to forward me specimens whilst in 
England, proved, with one exception, quite unavailing. Thus, although I was 
ready to devote a considerable portion of my time, and to incur not a little - 
trouble and expense in order to provide a working collection of insects for our 
museum, I was unable to do anything for want of the necessary material, and 
was compelled to return to New Zealand almost as ignorant of its descriptive 
entomology as I left it. Labouring under such great disadvantages, I should 
not venture to lay the following remarks before you, had I not observed since 
my return a lamentable dearth of original papers in our Society ; and had I 
not also noticed that a meagre and imperfect paper often has the effect of 
eliciting valuable information from those who possess it. 
The poverty of the New Zealand fauna is well known, and the order 
Coleoptera affords but few exceptions to the general rule. Our beetles are 
