50 
REVIEWS. 
invite a study as particular as the Coleoptera have received, and some of 
them, perhaps, will afford a field as ample. Local Faunas, Monographs, 
the collections of voyagers, all have their use in building up parts of the 
unfinished fabric; and the productions of our own country naturally will 
occupy the greatest number of students at home. But, with the excep¬ 
tion of the two orders before named, the British collector quickly finds 
himself at a loss for any ready means of determining even the names of 
the puny myriads that flit or creep, dive or burrow, on every side about 
him. In default of manuals devoted to the productions of our own country, 
we may look abroad, next, to those which describe the insects of the 
nearest mainland, from which chiefly the island Fauna seems derived, a 
colony diminished by the broken continuity of land, and the lower summer 
temperature of a seagirt shore. The Fauna of France, whose territorial 
limits lean on the snowy buttresses of the Alps and Pyrenees, on either 
hand, flanking a gulf of the Mediterranean, whither many of the insects 
seem as if transmitted, with the hot winds, from the African coasts oppo¬ 
site, is enriched with Alpine and southern forms wholly strange to us. 
But a comparison of the Coleoptera of each, points to the inference that 
the British insect Fauna might almost be presented as an extract from that 
of neighbouring France; while the species deficient in the latter may 
mostly be found in the Scandinavian Fauna, along with the great majority 
common to the three countries. Passing beyond that order and the Lepi- 
doptera , the materials for such a comparison have been hitherto more im¬ 
perfect. We have coupled together, at the head of this article, the chief 
contributions to the Dipterous Fauna of Scandinavia, which have appeared 
since Meigen’s Systematic Description of the Diptera of Europe was com¬ 
pleted. The impulse given by that classical work to the study of this 
order has tended to antiquate itself in some degree, as Meigen’s terse and 
scientific definitions became inadequate, amid the additions made by the 
industry of his scholars. Among those who have contributed to such a 
revolution, the Swedes may justly claim a foremost place ; and we would 
scarcely dispute Bohemann’s judgment of the great work of Zetterstedt 
now concluded, that no other country can show a descriptive catalogue of 
its Diptera so complete and accurate as Sweden possesses.* Restricted to 
the limits of the Scandinavian and Jutish peninsulas and islands, it does 
not affect the character of a Dipterologxa Europe a, as Oken has ven¬ 
tured to style it. | But for the determination of the British species of 
Diptera in general, we have, up to this time, no book of reference as use- 
* Aarsberattelse for 1847-8. 
+ Isis, 1848, 696. 
