Page:Memoirs on the coleoptera (IA memoirsoncoleopt01case).pdf/9



The Myrmedoniini comprise by far the greater part of the large subfamily Aleocharinæ, and present a rather discouraging problem to the systematist through sheer force of numbers. In the European fauna probably a large proportion of the existing species have been described, though in an inconveniently scattered literature, so that it is difficult to identify many of the forms, especially as the types are widely diffused and in some instances probably lost. In the most recent European catalogue the greater part of those described are announced as synonyms of a few more accentuated species, possibly to thereby cut the Gordian knot of uncertainty of identification as much as anything, for many of these so-called synonyms are not truly such by any means. I do not think that the names printed in that catalogue under Acrotona fungi, for example, are synonyms in many instances, for I have received under this name from various European authorities at least four unequivocally distinct though generically related species.

Some describers have not taken pains to study their material with the care exercised by such investigators as Thomson, Kraatz and Rey, whose genera are nearly all valid as such, and the absence of information concerning the intermesocoxal sternal pieces and other important structural characters, renders it impossible to identify, with very few exceptions, the species published by Mäklin, Mannerheim, Melsheimer, Say, Erichson and many of those of Bernhauer, more particularly when founded upon short comparative statements concerning certain European species, positively authentic examples of which it is almost impossible for American students to obtain. As a result, even when the species of those authors are described as pertaining to special genera or subgenera, there are frequent mistakes in the assignments, rendering their work to some extent misleading and untrustworthy. This comes about in great degree from the method of mounting pursued by most of the European collectors of the smaller Coleoptera, the entire under T. L. Casey, Mem. Col. I, Sept. 1910.