62 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ONTARIO. 



ON THE ENTOMOLOGICAL RESULTS OF THE EXPLORATION OF THE 

 BRITISH WEST INDIA ISLANDS BY THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR 

 THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 



By L. 0. Howard, Ph. D. 



The extremely interesting and important work which is being done under the 

 auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in tne way of an 

 exploration of the fauna and flora of certain of the West India Islands, has attracted a 

 great deal of attention in this country. The comparatively large sums of money at the 

 disposal of the British Association enable it to carry on many lines of investigation of 

 greater or less importance. To working zoologists, however, the Association has never 

 done anything of greater importance than the present investigation. 



In 1887 the first appropriation of £100 was made by the Association. In 1888 the 

 committee in charge of the work co-operated with the sub-committee of the Government 

 grant committee of the Royal Society, and an additional appropriation of £250 was 

 made. That year, as a preliminary step, a bibliography of the published writings on the 

 fauna and flora of these islands was published in the Report of the British Association. 

 In 1889 Mr. F. du Cane Godman, who has done so much good by his survey of the fauna 

 and flora of Central America, cooperated with these committees by sending Mr. Herbert 

 H. Smith, the well known American collector, at his own expense, to St. Vincent. The 

 Association this year made a further grant of £180. In 1890 Mr. Smith had already 

 collected and sent in 3,000 insects from St. Vincent, and the announcement was made 

 that Mr. Godman had continued his employment and sent him to Grenada. At the close 

 of the year 1891 investigations had been made in Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbadoes, St. 

 Vincent, the Granadines, and Grenada. In 1892 the reports upon the insect material 

 began to be published. Practically the material in hand in entomology consists of Mr. 

 Smith's collections, covering a period of two years or more in the islands of St. Vincent and 

 Grenada. These islands are respectively the next to the northern-most and the southern- 

 most of the group known as the Windward Islands — St. Vincent lying directly south of 

 St. Lucia, and Grenada forming the bottom of the chain of the lesser Antilles, bounding 

 the Caribbean sea. Grenada lies only about seventy-five miles from Trinidad, and Trini- 

 dad, as is well known, possesses practically a South America peninsula fauna. The care- 

 ful survey of the results of the collections upon' these islands, therefore, should reveal 

 many interesting facts regarding the distribution of species, the most important of which 

 will be the determination of the continuation of the Central American fauna, which holds, 

 as we know, in the main, for the larger West India Islands, running from Yucatan and 

 Honduras through Cuba, Jamaica and San Domingo. Does this fauna persist down 

 through the lesser Antilles, or do we have in these extreme islands a fauna more similar 

 to that of the closely adjacent coast of South America, or is there a coast fauna common 

 to these islands and the entire coast line of South and Central America 1 



In these investigations the British committee has shown an energy and catholicity 

 of spirit very much to be admired, and which is quite in common, it seems to me, with 

 the general trend of British scientific work. The smallness of their own home island and 

 the thoroughness with which the insects are known has driven British entomologists to 

 all quarters of the globe in search of new material. The British systematists in entomo- 

 logy to-day are concerning themselves with collections from all sorts of out-of-the way 

 places. Wherever the British traveler goes (and the British are famous travelers), a col- 

 lection of insects is apt to result, and there is usually in England some worker who is 

 ready to undertake the description of the new forms. This is particularly the case with 

 the larger and better known orders, Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. Outside of these groups 

 the committee has found it desirable to ask the assistance of foreigners, both on the con- 

 tinent of Europe and in America. The material has been thus distributed in the hands 

 of many entomologists and the work of describing and classifying goes merrily on. 

 Already, although as previously stated, it was only in 1887 that the investigation was 

 first begun, papers have been published by Lord Walsingham on the Microlepidoptera ; 



