2 PAPEPiS ON COCCID.E OR SCALE INSECTS. 



collecting scale insects. He was assisted also by several of his col- 

 leagues in the office, notably Dr. L. O. Howard and Mr. Theo. Per- 

 gande. The results of this work appeared as Part II of his Annual 

 Report for 1880, in a paper on scale insects, which included descrip- 

 tions of most of the Coccidse then in the collection of the U. S. Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, lack of space preventing the description of all 

 the species which had been collected up to that time. Some -IS species 

 are listed and described in this report, more than half of which were 

 new to science. Previous to this only about 30 species had been de- 

 scribed by American writers, the majority of which are to be credited 

 to Dr. Asa Fitch. Most of the species referred to in Comstock's 

 report were figured, and these figures mark the beginning of really 

 careful scientific drawings of Coccidae, and have since been standard 

 illustrations of the species concerned. 



Doctor Howard, while assisting Professor Comstock in the study 

 of Coccidse, took up particularly the subject of the chalcidid para- 

 sites of these insects, and presented as Part III of Professor Com- 

 stock's report a paper entitled " Report on the Parasites of the 

 Coccidse in the Collection of this Dej)artment." This was the begin- 

 ning of Doctor Howard's work on chalcidid parasites and led to his 

 becoming the world's authority on the subject. How little was loiown 

 of these parasites previous to the publication of this paper is shown 

 by the fact that, with four or five exceptions, the species described 

 and figured were new to science. 



Professor Comstock retired from the position of Entomologist in 

 1881, but published in Professor Riley's Report for that year a short 

 illustrated article on Lac Insects, describing three new species. He 

 also gave a brief article on methods of controlling scale insects. A 

 much more important article on remedies for scale insects of the 

 orange, by Mr. H. G. Hubbard, is published in the same report. In 

 this paper some very good work is recorded and some of the more 

 important modeirn methods of control are given first exploitation. 



Professor Comstock's report on Coccidse in the Department Report 

 of 1880, as already indicated, was incomplete and did not include all 

 of the species collected. His final paper occupied the principal por- 

 tion of the Second Report of the Department of Entomology of the 

 Cornell University Experiment Station, published in 1883. This 

 paper is a brief monograph of the subfamily Diaspinae as repre- 

 sented in the fauna of North America, together with notes on species 

 not at that time observed in the United States. Several new species 

 are described in this report, and the latter concludes with a list of 

 the American nondiaspine scale insects. 



This practically concluded Professor Comstock's work on Coc- 

 cidse, and for a long period thereafter the systematic study of this 

 important group of insects practically ceased in this country. The 



