VI PREFACE. 



be elaborated according to the material of A. H. Fassl and the abundant collection yielded by Ribbe from the 

 Chiriqui having been most kindly made accessible to us by the firm of Dr. Statjdinger and Bang-Haas. But 

 with respect to this faunistic region — apart from Costa Rica perhaps — • we can state that numerous districts 

 have been insufficiently explored, and already the near future may supply us with a more compendious enlarge- 

 ment of oiu: knowledge. 



About Colombia and the districts of the Amazon and its tributaries the collections of A. H. 

 Fassl give us ample information. Some plates, such as the Agrias on pi. 113 B, have almost entirely been 

 made according to novelties from Fassl's Collection, which he collected in the unhealthy forests of Tropical 

 South America and which cost him his life, for he recently succumbed to the pernicious climate. We feel parti- 

 cularly pleased that he left a permanent memorial in the Additions just to this fifth volume. 



From Brazil and t h e w e s t e r n p a r t o f S o u t h A m e r i c a there existed likewise rich collec- 

 tions. Gaelepp's plentiful retm^ns from Peru supplied particularly abundant material. In Bolivia it was lil^e- 

 wise Fassl who collected very thoroughly though not very long and who put his rich material at our disposal. For 

 the adjacent parts of Argentina, the returns by Jose Steinbach yielded many good objects, whilst to 

 the south of that country and in Uruguay the editor himself was able to make many observations. The same 

 is the case with Brazil, where the editor collected considerable material especially in Bahia and from where 

 the greatest part of the biological notes originate which were interspersed in the text. Of great value were the 

 consignments from these South American districts by Mr. Zikan and Mr. Arp in Brazil. 



Moreover, both the compilers and the editor, for the sake of their studies, endeavoured to make use 

 of the special collections as well as of the large Museums. We here once more beg to express 

 our gratitude also to their directors or owners, as far as this had not already been done in the preface to the 

 volumes of the first part. By their kindness Courvoisier's Collection of the Lycaenids could be viewed, and 

 Mr. Abel in Leipsic hat the kindness to send tis some of his Hesperids for comparison. If I mention here that 

 for instance Lord Rothschild allowed me to study 2500 Erycinids of theTring Museum, it is easily understood 

 of what great importance such aid ^v&s in composing the different chapters. 



If the conclusion of this volume has been delayed for an entire decade, nobody will wonder at it who 

 remembers that just the native land of the work was the centre of those terrible convulsions to which 

 the world was exposed during that period. It is, on the contrary, astonishing and above all due to the subscribers' 

 forbearance that a scientific work such as the present one was able to outlast all these heavy blows withoiit 

 being harmed otherwise. 



^& 



I cannot edit this volume without emphatically thaixking the c o m p i 1 e r s of the different lepidopteral 

 families as well as the publisher for the immense sacrifice which the continuation of this work required 

 just in such hard times. It was the latter's ardent desire to reward, in close collaboration with the editor, the 

 subscribers' great patience to which they had been exposed by the disastrous events of the last ten years, and 

 to reach such a juncture, when the volume of the American day-butterflies could be put before the public 

 and those of the Indian and African faunae are on the point of being concluded. 



As to the way how the work was compiled, we may refer to the prefaces of the volumes of the palearctic 

 part. Nothing has changed in the editor's position towards the so-called international nomenclatiiral rules. 

 They must be rejected in the zoological world as a universally d.ecisive code of laws, aird entomology is not 

 entitled to have an exclusive position therein. This, however, does not preclude that the greatest part of these 

 rules, particularly those representing merely a precise wording of customs used long ago and having nowhere 

 been refused, are useful and have therefore also been applied throughout the ,,Macrolepidoptera". They have 

 probably only been rejected as a decisive code in as much as they did not only accomplish their main object 

 of creating a nomenclatural stability, but even often upset it, since constant unearthings 

 and fresh interpretations of old names produced new conflicts Vvdth the whole liberature on this subject. As 

 oiu: work is intended to be only a manual, we have tried to guard it against this defect which is mostly due 

 to the principle of priority having been too rigidly interpreted, but otherwise we in no way restrained 

 the auther m applying the customary nomenclatrural laws. 



It seems that many entomologists thought the ,,Macrolepidoptera" to offer the chance of putting the 

 treatment of lepidopterology on a scientific basis. The editor, however, could not chime in with this view 

 for ideal and practical reasons. E very specialist usually considers those methods and maxims by means of 

 which he gained his most important results to be the most valuable to science. It appears, however, to be 

 impossible to attain in this way the imiformity of the total work aspired at by the eddtor. Nearly exevy chapter 



