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Zoology Publications from Victoria University of Wellington—Nos. 66 and 67

Introduction

Introduction

Many earlier descriptions of Collembola were brief and not accompanied by the sufficiently detailed drawings now regarded as necessary in modern taxonomic studies.

Over the past twenty years I have been able to visit some of the world's important repositories for type material concerned with insect taxonomy. During the examination of the collections of Collembola in these institutions I prepared many drawings from type material or from specimens of species identified by their authors. In particular I visited the British museum of Natural History, London (for the sake of brevity designated in this paper as BMNH), the United States National Museum, Washington D.C. (USNM), the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (MCZ), the Manchester Museum, England (MM), the Illinois State Natural History Survey, and others in both Europe and the U.S.A.

The idea behind the work was a world monograph on the Collembola. However, because the completion of such a monograph is as far away as ever, it occurred to me that some of my drawings could, if published, be beneficial to present and future workers on Collembola. Hence this paper, which is the first in a short series of papers that will include notes and figures of hitherto unillustrated or inadequately illustrated species of Collembola together with new synonymies.