, thirty are Aglycyderidae, forty-five are Curculionidae, and
fourteen are Cerambycidae, the remainder being distributed among twenty-two
other families. Many important families, such as Cicindelidae,
Scaraboeidae, Buprestidae, and the whole of the enormous series of the
Phytophaga are either entirely absent or are only represented by a few
introduced species. In the eight families enumerated above most of the
species belong to peculiar genera which usually contain numerous distinct
species; and we may therefore consider these to represent the descendants
of the most ancient immigrants into the islands.

Two important characteristics of the Coleopterous fauna are, the small size
of the species, and the great scarcity of individuals. Dr. Sharp, who has
described many of them,[74] says they are "mostly small or very minute
insects," and that "there are few--probably it would be correct to say
absolutely none--that would strike an ordinary observer as being
beautiful." Mr. Blackburn says that it was not an uncommon thing for him to
pass a morning on the mountains and to return home with perhaps two or
three specimens, having seen literally nothing else except the few species
that are generally abundant. He states that he "has frequently spent an
hour sweeping flower-covered herbage, or beating branches of trees over an
inverted white umbrella without seeing the sign of a beetle of any kind."
To those who have collected in any tropical or even temperate country on or
near a continent, this poverty of insect life must seem almost incredible;
and it affords us a striking proof of how erroneous are those now almost
obsolete views which imputed the abundance, variety, size, and colour of
insects to the warmth and sunlight and luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.
The facts become quite intelligible, however, if we consider that only
{320} minute insects of certain groups could ever reach the islands by
natural means, and that these, already highly specialised for certain
defined modes of life, could only develop slowly into slightly modified
forms of the original types. Some of the groups, however, are considered by
Dr. Sharp to be very ancient generalised forms, especially the peculiar
family Aglycyderidae, which he looks upon as being "absolutely the most
primitive of all the known forms of Coleoptera, it being a synthetic form
linking the isolated Rhynchophagous series of families with the Clavicorn
series. About thirty species