SYNOPSES, CATALOGUES. AND LISTS OF NORTH 

 AMERICAN INSECTS. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Inquiries regarding the works most useful for the determination of 

 our native insects, as also about the most useful general works of ref- 

 erence, are among the jnost constantly recurring ones received by the 

 Entomologist; but satisfactory and short replies are in most instances 

 impossible, for the reason that the information is not contained in a 

 few comprehensive works, but is scattered through many different peri- 

 odicals and other publications. A complete list of such works, even of 

 those pertaining to a single Order of insects, is too long to be given in 

 an ordinary letter, and to obviate the difQculty experienced in such 

 correspondence this bulletin has been prepared. 



It was not our intention to compile a complete bibliography of the 

 classification of North American insects, but to give briefly the refer- 

 ences to such works and papers as are most useful for the identification of 

 our insects. Thus, we originally planned to give only the titles of mon- 

 ographs or synopses of families or subfamilies and to reject all papers 

 which contained disconnected descriptions of new species, or revisions 

 and synopses of isolated genera. But while preparing the bulletin it 

 was felt to be advisable to include smaller synoptic papers. For instance, 

 several large families, e. g., the Scarabteidse among the Goleoptera, have 

 recently been quite carefully revised, but the literature is in the form 

 of synopses of single genera which, in their aggregate,- form a more or 

 less complete monograph of the whole family. In this case either these 

 smaller synopses had to be mentioned in this bulletin or the whole fam- 

 ily had to be omitted. 



On the other hand, many of the monographs here mentioned are an- 

 tiquated, so as to be of little value at the present time ; or they are 

 mofiographs comprising the genera and species of all countries, and 

 difficult for the student of the American fauna to use, from the fact that 

 the descriptions of the American genera are almost lost amongst the 

 mass of foreign material. 



It were futile to attempt to discriminate in such an enumeration 

 between the more useful and the more or less useless, but as a rule we 

 would recommend to the student to consult rather the later than the 



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