16 
INTRODUCTION. 
who first describes them. That is, every distinct species of insect that 
ha*s been described or accurately figured is designated by the specific 
name assigned to it by its first describer. The problem then is, with 
living or preserved insects on one side, and the mass of descriptions or 
figures on the other, to correlate the two. 
Only working entomologists ever realise the immense labour in¬ 
volved in this work, except in the case of the fauna of a locality such 
as England where the insects have been studied very closely, where 
there are ample books, and reference collections. Where one has either 
a description of every species of insect of a country or a good reference 
collection, identification is a matter of so much comparison, but where as 
in India, the only handbooks contain descriptions only of part of the 
known insects, or where there are no handbooks at all, only scattered 
descriptions, and where there are no reference collections and access to 
the National Collections at the British Museum is impossible, the actual 
identification of an insect is not an easy matter and is not, as a rule, even 
possible in India. The question must remain so until there are complete 
handbooks such as the Fauna of India, which are kept up-to-date, and 
also complete reference collections of Indian insects, accurately named; 
progress to these is being slowly made, but very slowly indeed. 
Actually if an insect belonging to one of the families described in 
the Fauna of India is sent in for identification, it is examined, referred 
to some division of its family, worked out with the generic key in the 
volume and compared with the descriptions in the volume ; if it exactly 
agrees with the description of a particular species, it is believed to be 
that species and is, if possible, compared with a specimen that has been 
identified by a specialist in that family. If it agrees with no species 
in the volume, it may be either a species described since the volume was 
prepared, or a species known from another country but not from India, 
or a new species ; to determine this requires an expert knowledge of the 
family, a complete literature of the family and a reference collection. 
On the other hand, if a beetle, for instance, is sent in, it is examined, 
referred to its family, and compared with any accurately named speci¬ 
mens of its kind which are available ; if it agrees with none of them it 
must be sent to a specialist in that family who has the literature, the 
reference collection, and, after years of work on that particular family, 
