History of tropical forest entomology and important literature

Apart from traditional knowledge about common forest insects such as bees, termites, lac insect and silkworm, which dates back to pre-historic times, scientific literature on tropical forest insects has started accumulating since the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1779, Koenig, a student of Linnaeus working in India, published the first scientific study of termites (Koenig, 1779) and in 1782, Kerr, also working in India, published a study on the lac insect (Kerr, 1781). A report on insect borers of girdled teak trees was published in 1836 and one on the beehole borer of live teak trees during the 1840s, both from observations made in Myanmar (then Burma) (Beeson, 1941). Forest entomology in India, in particular, produced prolific literature between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. Accounts of immature stages of forest insects and of timber borers were published in India in the 1850s and 1860s. Several accounts on Indian forest insects appeared in Indian Museum Notes and Indian Forester, both published since 1875; and in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society published since 1883. The first volume of Indian Forester in 1875 contained an account of the toon shoot borer, even before the insect was scientifically named Hypsipyla robusta in 1886 (Beeson, 1941). In 1893–6, Hampson authored four volumes on Moths under the well-known Fauna of British India series, which contained taxonomic and biological information on many forest moths (Hampson, 1893–6).