Mealybugs Of California PDF Download

Excerpt from The California Species of Mealy Bugs The systematic literature dealing with certain groups of the Coccidae or scale insects is extremely unsatisfactory, this condition being especially pronounced in the case of those groups commonly called the "soft scales." The present author (4) has stated in an earlier paper that ." . . of the nearly 100 species of mealy bugs thus far described from North America, including some 35 from California, not more than three or four are recognizable at all on the basis of the published descriptions if taken apart from their typical host and their type locality," nor at the time of the present writing does this statement need any extensive modification. A few species have been described since the statement was originally made and to some of these it may not apply, but so far as the species known at that time arc concerned, the additional claim may safely be made that even under the optimum conditions cited, the identification of many of our species can not be accomplished with reasonable certainty. The actuating motive of the present paper has been the hope of remedying this condition as far as may be for those species of mealy bugs occurring in California. However, progress toward this goal has been made possible only by the utilization of certain methods not ordinarily employed, at least by American entomologists, and by the emphasizing of certain morphological features of which some have been entirely overlooked and of which the full significance of none seems at any time to have been realized. The scope of the paper has therefore been extended to include an explanation of these methods and a description of these morphological features. The restriction of the paper to those species occurring in California has not been due to any desire to keep within the boundaries of some artificially defined political unit nor to any belief that the California mealy-bug fauna is at all separable as a group from that of the rest of North America. The limitations imposed have been purely those of convenience. It so happens that most of the species known from west of Colorado and New Mexico have been described from California and that the types of these are for the most part in western collections. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.