A Systematic Classification of Pseudococcus and Some Related Genera—Part I. By G. Brittin. [Read before the Auckland Institute, September 21, 1938; received by the Editor, August 1, 1938; issued separately, December, 1938.] The literature dealing with the systematic classification of the Coccidae, with few exceptions, is extremely unsatisfactory; particularly is this so in New Zealand, where practically nothing has been done to remedy it. G. F. Ferris (1918), when reporting on some mealy bugs found in California, made the following statement, which is as true to-day as it was then:—“… Of the nearly 100 mealy bugs thus far described from North America, including some 35 from California, not more than three or four are recognisable at all on the basis of the published descriptions if taken apart from their typical host and type locality.” This is a challenging statement, and calls for consideration by all students of the group, who must in the future do their best to remedy such a defect. Several have already attempted to solve it with but partial success. Berlese (1893) has described some of the structures that could be made use of in identification, and Marchal (1908) seems to have been the first to make use of them. Smith (1911) investigated the value of characters ordinarily used, and later (1913) discussed the possible value of others. In spite of this, however, very little progress appears to have been made. It was in the early days of my studies that the difficulty of identifying already-named species made itself so apparent, and but for the courtesy of the Government Entomologist at that time, in allowing me to examine the type slides of the Maskell collection, and also for the assistance rendered by Mr E. E. Green, who had received specimens from Mr Maskell, I would have been forced to give up. Thus at the outset I decided that as soon as my collection approached anything near a reasonable number, I would endeavour to take each genus separately and try to bring order out of chaos. The work, of course, has been very slow, and was made more so by the large number of new species discovered, and still being discovered, and also by the fact that many of my earlier preparations were found to be unsatisfactory and had to be re-mounted; again, the loss of specimens when transferring from one place to another added to my difficulties. Further trouble was also experienced through not being able to find workable descriptions of the different genera concerned, since every author appeared to have his own opinion as to what should be considered generic characters. However, thanks to scientific friends, the difficulty has been overcome as far as the group of genera here mentioned is concerned, and I trust that this will be only the first of a series of papers containing descriptions of all new species, and re-descriptions of all species