9 
COLEOPTERA. 
In the dissertation alluded to, the genus Paussus is exemplified by a single species, 
P. microcephalus, and Diopsis by D. ichneumonea, a plate with figures of both of 
which, drawn by J. Afzelius, and engraved by Berquist, accompany the descriptions. 
It is to this plate, and the original descriptions of Linnaeus, that Fuessly is indebted 
solely for the account he gives of both these genera, in his Archiv. der Insectengeschickte, 
printed at Zurich in 1783, as well as in the French translation of that work which 
afterwards appeared in Paris. Indeed, as Professor Afzelius has suggested, from the 
repeated errors that appear in those works, in translating the Linnaean observations, 
defining the character of the genus Paussus, &c., it is very likely that neither Fuessly, 
nor his translators, Herbst, Gmelin, and some other writers who have treated on it, 
ever saw an insect either of this genus, or of Diopsis. 
Thunberg, during his travels through the country of the Hottentots in 1772, found 
two coleopterous insects, which he conceived, with much propriety, ought to be referred 
to a new genus, none of those established previous to his departure from Europe by 
Linnaeus being calculated to admit them. But on his return to Sweden, he found that 
Linnaeus in his absence had described the genus Paussus, to which they might be 
referred. An account of these was afterwards inserted in the Transactions of the 
Royal Academy of Stockholm for 1781 : this paper is accompanied with a figure of 
only one of the insects mentioned, P. lineatus, a species very aptly named, from the 
distinct longitudinal streak on each of the wing cases ; the other insect described by 
Thunberg, he calls ruber. Fabricius consigned these, with the Linnaean insect, to 
his genus Cerocoma. 
The latest history of the genus Paussus, previous to the first edition of this work, 
was from the pen of Professor Afzelius, a learned, copious, and elaborate paper, inserted 
in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, in which he describes 
Paussus microcephalus, and another species which he found in Africa, which he names 
P. sphaerocerus. Neither of those insects are allied to the species figured in this plate, 
which were entirely undescribed. For this important accession of new species to a 
group so little known, Donovan was indebted to the active and praise-worthy zeal 
of Mr. Fichtel, in compliment to whom one of them is named Fichtelii. 
Since the publication of the first edition of this work, various additional species 
have been discovered, constituting a very natural family, distributed into several distinct 
genera, of which I have published a monograph in the sixteenth volume of the Linnaean 
Transactions. I have also more recently become acquainted with several other species, 
of which figures and descriptions have been laid before the Entomological Society of 
London. 
c 
