their range of food habit and other facts in their life history, and 
various other points of value and interest. 
The records consulted show a present known total of between 150 and 
200 species of insects that occur more or less frequently and normally 
in stored materials. About half of these species have been reared and 
observed at this office. 
Certain of the more interesting and lesser-known forms have received 
mention in short articles and notes published in divisional bulletins 
and elsewhere, and the commoner species have been treated in a more 
popular manner in three articles, prepared, respectively, for the Year- 
book of the Department of Agriculture for 1894, a Bulletin on House- 
hold Insects (Bull. No. 4, n. s.,) issued by this Division, and a Farmers' 
Bulletin recently published by the Department, making a total of 
eleven titles of publications having a bearing on this subject. 
The completion of a more comprehensive bulletin is necessarily of 
so slow accomplishment that it has been thought desirable to bring 
together for publication a portion of the accumulated information on 
some of the more interesting new or little-known species. This matter 
is presented in the following ten articles, prepared in a somewhat 
more popular or less technical style than will be pursued in the more 
exhaustive work planned. 
The different injurious species here considered are all amenable to sim- 
ilar treatment, and for the benefit of such as may not be fully informed 
upon this subject it should be stated that a consideration of methods of 
control, together with brief accounts of eighteen of the more important 
species affecting stored cereals, prepared by the writer by direction of 
the Assistant Secretary, has recently been issued as Farmers' Bulletin 
No. 45, by this Department, and may be had by application to the 
Secretary of Agriculture. 
For convenience of publication it has been found necessary to group 
the accounts here given under a single comprehensive title. Hence it 
should be stated for bibliographical purposes that, although each 
account is not signed by the author, each should be indexed separately, 
as there is no connection between the different articles. Each is, to a 
certain extent, complete in itself, having no special bearing on either 
what precedes or follows it in the order given. 
F. H. C. 
