1924 ] Notes Upon Surcoufs Treatment af the Tahanidce 25 
Nevertheless the treatment of the bionomics is very inadequate 
and hardly does justice to our present knowledge. Thus it is 
stated that ‘The habits of Goniops are unknown” (p. 105), al- 
though the life-history of that genus has been worked out by 
W. R. Walton (Ent. News, XIX, 1908, pp, 464-465, PL XXII) 
and W. L. McAtee (Proc. Ent. Soc. Washington, XIII, 1911, 
pp. 21-29, Pis. I-III). Incidentally it may be mentioned that 
Surcoufs supposition that Goniops lives as an external parasite 
“after the fashion of Hippohosca^’ is a mere surmise not backed 
by any observation and highly improbable. To return to the 
bionomics of the family, W. Marchand has fortunately published 
a recent and very full account of “The Early Stages of Tabanidse” 
(Monogr. of the Rockefeller Institute, New York, No. 13, 1920, 
204 pp., 15 Pis.), in which the student will find all needed infor- 
mation. In his discussion of the parasitary specificity of tabanids 
(pp. 189-190), Surcouf mentions that, while most of the blood- 
sucking species attack mammals, Tabanus crocodilinus Austen 
and other African forms bite crocodiles and that he has himself 
taken a Tabanus in the Sahara on Varanus griseus. Still more 
remarkable, however, is the behavior of Tabanus albipectus 
Bigot, which, according to Fryer’s observations in the Seychelles 
(Austen, Bull. Ent. Research, XI, 1920, p. 45), attacks sea- 
turtles, biting them between the plates of the neck. 
It would be fastidious to list the errors of dates and pages 
which I have noticed in the bibliography, but the student should 
be warned against trusting the references indiscriminately. 
REMARKS UPON THE GENERA 
Surcouf is extremely conservative in his taxonomic treat- 
ment, since, with few exceptions, he accepts only genera that 
have been in use for a long time among students of the group. 
He retains the division into two subfamilies, Tabaninse and 
Pangoniinae, proposed more than fifty years ago by H. Loew 
(Die Dipteren-Faima Siidafrika’s, I, 1860, pp. 14 and 31). 
Thaumastocera Griinberg he places at the end of the family as a 
genus of doubtful affinities, but, on account of the absence of 
tibial spurs, it certainly comes in the Tabaninse, a group which. 
