TRANSACTIONS. 



I. — On some Type Specimens of Lepidoptera and Coleoptera in the Edinburgh 



Museum of Science and Art. By Percy Hall Grimshaw, F.E.S., Natural 



History Department, Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. Communicated 

 by Dr R. H. Traquair, F.R.S. (With Plate.) 



(Read 17th May, 1897. ) 



In the year 1819 the University of Edinburgh acquired by purchase a large 

 zoological collection from M. Dufresne, of Paris, including a cabinet containing 

 upwards of 12,000 specimens of insects. Some years later (in 1855), when the whole 

 of the University collections were formally transferred to the Science and Art Depart- 

 ment, the Dufresne cabinet became public property. 



While consulting lately the volume by Godart devoted to the article " Papilio" in 

 the famous Encyclopedic Methodique, I was surprised to see a reference to the 

 " Dufresne cabinet " in one of the descriptions of new species, and it immediately 

 occurred to me that the specimen in our possession must be the actual " type " of the 

 species, which discovery led me to search carefully through the whole of the volumes 

 devoted to insects in this well-known work, with a view to finding as many types as 

 possible. At the same time, I thought it possible that Olivier, who wrote his great 

 Histoire Naturelle des Insectes — Coleopteres about the same time, might also mention 

 some of Dufresne's specimens, and this I found to be as I had anticipated. Altogether, 

 in the two works mentioned, I find no less than twelve references to butterflies and forty 

 to beetles in the Dufresne cabinet. I have been successful in finding all the types of 

 butterflies, but in the case of the beetles about half of them are missing. These are not 

 mentioned in the MS. catalogue which accompanied the collection, and hence must either 

 have been removed from the cabinet before it came to Edinburgh, or, as is much more 

 probable, must be among the unnamed specimens, in which case the types must remain 

 unidentified until such time as all the specimens have been carefully examined and 

 referred to their proper species. 



rVOL. XXXIX. PART I. (NO. 1). A 



