III.—The Miocene Insect-fauna of Œningen, Baden

Extract

Thanks solely to the labours of the late Oswald Heer, the fossil insect-fauna of Œningen is better known than that of any other locality or horizon in the world. But it is by no means so well known as it should be; for although Heer, in his latest enumeration of the specimens seen by him (Urwelt der Schweiz, 2^e Aufl. 1879, p. 383), repeats precisely the same figures he has already given in 1861 (Recherches sur le climat du pays tert., p. 197), indicating in an interval of eighteen years no addition to his material (over 5000 specimens), his repeated additions to the number of species from that locality show that he had not fully worked over what he had. Indeed, thirty years ago, I arranged for exhibition in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge a collection of nearly one hundred and fifty named species secured by Prof. Louis Agassiz from Heer, of which more than forty still remain undescribed; there are also a considerable number of merely nominal species enumerated by Heer in his Urwelt der Schweiz and elsewhere, duly catalogued by me in my Index to Fossil Insects (Bull. U. S. Geol. Surv. No. 71), but as yet neither described nor figured. In addition to this it may be noted that in the enumeration referred to above Heer mentions 543 species of beetles, while less than 270 nominal species have yet been published from Œningen, and only seven species from the Swiss Miocene, included in the enumeration.