4 PAPEES ON COCCIDiE OE SCALE INSECTS. 



San Jose scale and its nearest allies,*^ and, through the Smithsonian 

 Institution, papers on the food phmts of scale insects,* directions for 

 collecting and preserving scale insects," and geographical distribution 

 of scale insects.*^ 



RECENT WORK OE THE BUREAU. 



The resumption of active study of Coccidse in connection with the 

 Department of Agriculture began in the early nineties, partly as a 

 result of the interest aroused by the San Jose scale and the necessity 

 of being able to determine at once and authoritatively all material 

 which was coming in supposedl}^ representing this new and danger- 

 ous species. It proved, in other words, impracticable to be dependent 

 for such determinations on specialists at a distance. Mr. Pergande, 

 who had had charge of the coccid collections, had his time so fully 

 taken up with other lines of investigation, notably the subjects of 

 Aphididee and.Formicidae, that he could not keep up with the rapidly 

 increasing collection and literature in Coccidse. To meet the need 

 and following the incentive of an old interest the writer therefore 

 took as his special field in systematic entomology the subject of 

 Coccidse. A season spent in studying orange insects in southern Cali- 

 fornia accentuated his interest in the subject, and general charge 

 of the Department collections in this family was assumed by him in 

 1900, and a thorough reorganization of the collection and notes was 

 then begun. Before this work had progressed very far it was inter- 

 rupted for more than a year by a trip to the Orient, in which, how- 

 ever, the scale insects were the special object of study and collection. 



During the twenty years which had elapsed since the work of Com- 

 stock, a great mass of material had accumulated, most of it preserved 

 under very bad conditions, and more than half of it unidentified. It 

 was no small undertaking to bring all this mass into order, and in 

 this work the writer was assisted during a number of years by Messrs. 

 J. Kotinsky and E. R. Sasscer. 



The enormous increase in the number of scale insects, and the 

 amount of technical work necessary to determine the validity of spe- 

 cies and to identify new material, made it early evident that it would 

 be impossible for the writer to keep the whole subject as his own 

 field, and in January, 1905, Mr. J. G. Sanders was appointed an 

 assistant in the Bureau and became the writer's colleague in the study 

 of Coccidse, the important field of the nondiaspine scale insects, to- 

 gether with the collections and notes, being turned over to him un- 

 reservedly. Mr. Sanders is also charged with the very important 



a Tech. Ser. 6, Div. Ent., U. S. Dept. Agric, 1897. 



6 Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., XIX, No 1122, pp. 725-785, 1897. 



c Bui. 39, Part L, U. S. Nat. Mus., 1897. 



^ Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., XVII, No. 1026, pp. 615-625, 1895. 



