Svenska Fjärilar

Abstract

THIS splendidly printed and illustrated monograph, although bearing the date 1941, has only recently come to hand. It is under the general editorship of the well-known entomologist, Albert Tullgren, who contributes an introduction. Being of quarto size, a very large amount of information is provided in its 440 pages, and nearly every species of the Swedish Macrolepidoptera is figured in its fifty coloured plates. The so-called Microlepidoptera are left for future treatment. The monograph is divided into two parts which, for some reason or other, have separate pagination. Part 1 is devoted to general structure, habits, protective resemblance, distribu tion, etc., together with keys to the various families. It also contains a general bibliography of a limited kind; and runs to eighty-six pages with sixty-six text-figures and twelve distributional maps. In the latter, the range of each of the species shown is indicated by individual dots representing each locality, as has been done in E. B. Ford's recent volume on “British Butterflies”. Part 2 constitutes the bulk of the mono graph, and in its 354 pages (the subject-matter of which is arranged in double columns) will be found the essential information regarding the Swedish species, their range of distribution in that country, the larvae and their food-plants. Some 369 text-figures portray genitalic characters and those features shown by the caudal extremity in great numbers of the pupae. The coloured plates are of general all-round excellence: they are chromolithographs that give an accurate life-like representation of the adult insects and many of their larvae. We do not recollect having seen finer coloured plates of their kind illustrating Lepidoptera, notwithstanding the large number of works that have been published on this order of insects.

Svenska Fjärilar

Systematik bearbotning av Sveriges Storfjärilar, Macrolepidoptena. Av Frithiof Nordström och Einar Wahlgren. Pp. iv + 86 + 354 + 50 plates. (Stockholm: Nordisk Familjeboks Förlags A.-B., 1941.) 115 kr.