Indian Entomology

Abstract

THE hot valleys of the Himalayan regions of our Indian Empire have always justly had especial interest from an entomological point of view. The number of peculiar and apparently strictly endemic, forms of insects already known from this region is great, and principally in the larger species, for even now we know less of the smaller insect-forms of North India than we do of many other less familiar districts not under the advantage of British rule. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, much of the knowledge we now possess is not precisely of modern origin. The somewhat numerous military expeditions to, and across, the Himalayas, undertaken within the last quarter of a century, arid; the great recent extension of tea and cinchona plantations in these regions, have not resulted in a corresponding increase in materials for a Himalayan insect-fauna. In some respects it may be said that we are likely to know more of the entomology of the Lake region of Africa, or of the Amazons region of South America, than of a vast and varied district, for the most part under the government of our own countrymen, and of a commercial importance second (to us) to no other. Still, important and wonderful discoveries have been made of late years, but they are perhaps eclipsed by the acknowledged existence of forms discovered long ago which would have become almost traditional were it not that the “types” exist in collections, and that they were duly described and delineated with infinite care in works that are no longer modern. As a summary, then, to the foregoing short introduction to a notice of a modern work on Indian Entomology, it may be briefly stated that a great deal of our knowledge was initiated before the present generation, and has not since been adequately supplemented.

Descriptions of New Indian Lepidopterous Insects, from the Collection of the Late Mr. W. S. Atkinson, M.A., F.L.S., &c.

Part I. Rhopalocera, by W. C. Hewitson, F.L.S.; Heterocera, by Frederic Moore, Assist. Curator, India Museum. With an Introductory Notice by Arthur Grote, F.Z.S., &c. 4to, pp. 1-88, with Three Coloured Plates. (Calcutta: Published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1879.)