Natural History of District of Columbia— McAtee 25 



1816 up to the year 1859 apparently not an insect was 

 recorded from the District and none had ever been orig- 

 inally described from the area. Then began the work of 

 Baron Charles Robert von den Osten Sacken and those 

 whom he interested and assisted, which laid such a splendid 

 foundation for the study of certain groups not only for the 

 District but for the United States. 



Baron Osten Sacken was secretary to the Russian legation 

 from 1856 to 1862 and visited Washington from time to 

 time up to the year 1877. In 1859, as indicated above, he 

 published his first paper relating to the insect fauna of the 

 District, and a splendid one it was. It dealt with the smaller 

 crane-flies, of which 46 species were recorded from the Dis- 

 trict of Columbia. All but four of these are new species, 

 and 16 of them have the District as the sole place of capture, 

 thus unquestionably making it their type locality. Osten 

 Sacken was an indefatigable collector and he sent his speci- 

 mens of all but a few families to Dr. Hermann Loew of 

 Meseritz, Germany, who used them as a basis for a series of 

 monumental systematic papers. Loew's first article on this 

 material also appeared in 1859, and it recorded from Wash- 

 ington 7 species of the dipterous family Helomyzidae, five 

 of them new. In his series known as the "Centuries," Loew 

 described 1,000 ( !) species of North American flies. One 

 hundred and fifty-seven of these species are recorded from 

 the District of Columbia, of which 152 are new and 147 have 

 the District as the sole and therefore type locality. Some 30 

 additional new species from Washington are described by 

 this author in other papers. 



Baron Osten Sacken himself described more than 80 spe- 

 cies of diptera from the District of Columbia and 40 of gall 

 flies or Cynipidae. Together Osten Sacken and Loew record 

 more than 350 species of flies from the Washington region 

 of which more than 260 were described by them as new to 

 science. 



Before the era of Osten Sacken was past, entomologists 

 became a larger element in the scientific population of Wash- 

 ington, most of them being attracted here by the rise of 

 Entomology in the United States Department of Agricul- 



