The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma / edited by A.E. Shipley. Dermaptera (Earwigs) / by Malcolm Burr.

Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma / edited by A.E. Shipley. Dermaptera (Earwigs) / by Malcolm Burr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    Vlll AUTHOR'S PREFACE. The Earwigs form a compact, homogeneous and well-defined group of insects. Owing to a superficial resemblance to certain Staphylinida, Linnseus included them in the Coleo- ptera, but de Geer placed them in his Order Dermaptera, which corresponded to the Orthoptera of Olivier^ in the modern acceptance of the name. Kirby, in 1815, treated them as a distinct Order, restricting to them de Geer's name Dermaptei'a, which had been superseded by Olivier's word for the larger group. Authors were then divided into two camps, those in favour of considering the earwigs as an Order and those who preferred to regard them as a Family of the Orthoptera. The actual name employed for the group of earwigs has varied still more. Erichson and Fischer called them Labi- duroidce; Latreille, Serville, and Scudder, Forficulidce; Newman and Fischer von Waldheim, Forculxna, followed at first by Burmeister, who later proposed Dermaptera in all amended form, Bermatoptera. Westwood invented the appropriate name Euplexoptera, and Fischer, Harmoptera; Brunner called them Forficularia, as a family of the Ortho- ptera; Bolivar regards them as a section of the Orthoptera, under the name Dermaptera, with the single family Forfi- culidce. Dohrn, Redtenbacher, Krauss and Verhoeff follow Kirby, in giving them full ordinal rank, under de Geer's name Dermaptera; but de Bormans, in his monograph published in Das Tierreich, treats them as a family, Forficulidce. Our own inclination is to treat them as a distinct order,