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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIV 



catalogue deals with the head. This circumstance furnishes a 

 rather welcome excuse for avoiding all discussion of the numer- 

 ous disputable points in nomenclature with which the work nec- 

 essarily bristles, but leaves the way free for remarks of a more 

 general character. 



It is interesting to find that the new catalogue of an order so 

 extensive and of such economic importance as the TIemiptera 

 has been written in the Hawaiian Islands, and published in Ber- 

 lin. One would have supposed it equally impossible to prepare 

 a work of this sort in such a remote locality, and to persuade a 

 German publisher to bring it out -in English! Here it is, how- 

 ever, and so far as a rather careful scrutiny reveals, it is well 

 above the average of such tilings in completeness, accuracy and 

 typographical excellence. The price also is reasonable enough. 

 It is no mere list of names and references: localities, food-plants 

 and natural enemies are fully cited, while great care is 

 taken to include all sorts of biological and even embryolog- 

 ical citations. At the beginning of each subfamily or tribe 

 is a table showing the geographical distribution of the genera, 

 bringing out various interesting facts. Thus the great 

 number of genera of Acanthosomini in Australia and in 

 the Chilean region is remarkable, and might he offered as an 

 additional argument for a former land connection. It appears, 

 however (if the genera are arranged in correct systematic order), 

 that the Australian and Chilean types stand far apart and are 

 more related to those of the Oriental and Palaearctic regions than 



marking that "considerable misapprehension regarding these is 

 due to the absurd and unphilosophieal separation, by most geol- 

 ogists, of present ( Pleistocene) time from the rest of the Tertiary 

 (or Kainozoic) as a "Quaternary" epoch. The feeling that the 

 species of the older Tertiary periods are the direct precursors, 

 with but little separation in (geologic) time, of present-day 

 forms, is thus lost, and these interesting relics are regarded with 

 indifference by the majority of entomologists." While it is not 

 probable that the present geological classification will be aban- 

 doned, it must certainly be admitted that if the Tertiary period 

 is made to include an amount of time at all comparable to that 



