ON A COLLECTION OF JAVANESE CRANE-FLIES (TIP-ULIDAE, DIPTERA) IN THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. By Charles Paul Alexander, 0/ the Entomological Laboratory of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. INTRODUCTION. The present paper is based on the extensive collections of insects taken on the island of Java in 1909 by Messrs. Owen Bryant and William Palmer. The crane-flies of this collection number about 150 specimens referable to some 60 species. There has been a great amount of work done upon the crane-fly fauna of India and the East Indies in recent years and this has been accomplished for the greater part by the following workers: Wiedemann in his Diptera exotica (1821) and Aussereuropaische zweifliigelige Insekten (1828) characterized a number of Javan species. His descriptions are excellent and very few of his species remain unrecognized. Francis Walker described a very considerable num-ber of species, since he had access to the immense collections of the British Museum and William W. Saunders, the latter including most of the material taken by Alfred RusseU Wallace in the Malay Archipelago. DoleschaU (1856-1858) described a few species from the Dutch East Indies. Van der Wulp up until his death in 1899 published a number of articles deahng w^ith the dipterous fauna of Java; these papers contain splendid descriptions and often beauti-fully colored figures by the author. The living workers include Brunetti whose recent volume on the Diptera Nematocera of India (Fauna of British India, 1912) will do much to stimulate the study of this order in that country. Ender-lein, who has pubUshed one very valuable paper (1912), most of his East Indian material being from Sumatra. Riedel in a short series of articles (Supplementa Entomologica, No. 1, August, 1912; Ento-mologische Mitteilungen, vol. 2, August, 1913), has worked over Sauter's Formosan collections. Edwards has given some very valu-able contributions to our knowledge of the Oriental and African faunas; his most recent paper, a revision of the difficult genus Styringomyia (1914) is especially helpful.-By far the most important work on the crane-fhes of the island under consideration is that of Doctor de Meijere who has pubhshed a long series of valuable articles on the Dipterous fauna of Southeast Asia. Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 49— No. 2103. 157
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