Beetles 
249 
the specialists have been driven to turn their microscopes on the most obscure 
and insignificant parts of the body, and to take cognizance of the slightest 
appreciable constant differences. The real way in which an entomologist 
gets his beetles classified is to submit specimens to a specialist for determina¬ 
tion. Then as his authoritatively determined collection gradually increases, 
the collector begins to get acquainted with certain well-marked species, and 
also with the general appearance or habitus of the members of any one family. 
He becomes in time able to classify his new specimens to families, not by 
tables or keys ; but by general appearance and a certain few characteristic 
structural peculiarities, and to determine some species by comparison with 
the already classified specimens in his collection. The eye thus gradually 
trained becomes more and more discriminating, and the collector may in 
time come to be a recognized “ coleopterist ” both by virtue of his large col¬ 
lection and the rare forms it contains and by his wide personal ac¬ 
quaintanceship with beetle species. In the necessarily limited account of 
the Coleoptera given in the following pages I purpose to give keys only to 
tribes and families, and, in order to make even these simple enough to be 
useful, to leave most of the small, rare, and obscure families wholly out of 
consideration. 
The- tables thus freed of over half the families of the order still include 
five-sixths of all the North American beetle kinds, and will be found to include 
nine out of every ten beetle species collected. That is, the great proportion, 
ninety per cent, probably, of species at all common enough to be collected 
belong to less than half of the recognized families. These more familiar 
families can also be grouped into a few tribes, each having some simple 
common structural characteristic, thus still further aiding in the work of the 
classifier. The collector will thus first classify his specimen to a tribe by 
means of the table on page 251, and then turning to a discussion of that 
particular tribe find a key to its families.* In the discussion of each of 
these will be found accounts of the life of certain of the more abundant, wide¬ 
spread, and interesting species of the family. 
The characteristics of the order as a whole are obvious and familiar: 
most beetles are readily known for beetles, and but few insects of other orders 
get mistaken for them. The “black beetle” of the house is a cockroach, 
and several of the hard-bodied, blackish sucking-bugs are sometimes mis¬ 
takenly called beetles, as are also the earwigs. But the horny fore wings, 
elytra, serving as a sheath for the large membranous hind wings, the true 
* If the collector wishes a further determination of his specimens, he must do as prac¬ 
tically all other amateur and most professional entomologists do; that is, send his 
material to a specialist, who has, by the way, the right recognized by custom of keeping 
any of these specimens sent him, to add to his own cabinets. It is well, therefore, to 
send an extra specimen to return in the case of any species likely to interest him. 
