. Ants; their structure, development and behavior. fty years after the publication of Latreilles work sys-tematic myrmecology stagnated, till a revival of interest in the subjectbegan to set in about the middle of the past century with the work ofXylander and Mayr. Both of these authors devoted themselves to acareful study of the European species, Nylander to the boreal, Frenchand Mediterranean, and Mayr to the Austrian and eventually to thewhole European fauna. Both authors, but especially Mayr, definedthe genera and species more accurately than any of their prede-cessors. Later Mayr extended
. Ants; their structure, development and behavior. fty years after the publication of Latreilles work sys-tematic myrmecology stagnated, till a revival of interest in the subjectbegan to set in about the middle of the past century with the work ofXylander and Mayr. Both of these authors devoted themselves to acareful study of the European species, Nylander to the boreal, Frenchand Mediterranean, and Mayr to the Austrian and eventually to thewhole European fauna. Both authors, but especially Mayr, definedthe genera and species more accurately than any of their prede-cessors. Later Mayr extended his studies to the faunas of foreigncountries and published several important works on the ants of Asia,Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Forel, in comment-ing on his work says: His remarkable perspicacity in creating genera,and in general in the distinction of the comparative value of zoologicalcharacters, and the minute exactitude of all his writings, which repre-sent a vast amount of labor, have raised myrmecology to the rank of. FIG. 69. Worker of Apha-nogaster beccarii ofthe Indomalayan region. (Bingham.) 126 ANTS. the best known portions of entomology. A well-known Englishlivmenopterist of the same period, Frederick Smith, undertook a similaruniversal stud) of the ants, basing his descriptions on the numerousspecimens from all parts of the world in the collections of the BritishMuseum. Man)- of his species are so inadequately described that thewriters of today are obliged either to discard them or to make pilgrimagesto the British Museum for the sake of consulting the types from whichthey were drawn, and while some of his species bear appropriate oreven elegant names, and have been identified after much labor with afair degree of certainty, his generic distinctions give evidence of de-ficient classificatory sense. During the latter half of the nineteenthcentury a considerable number of local Euro-pean ant faunas were published and our knowl-edge of the ants
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectants, bookyear1910
