EDITORIAL
The 'smaller moths' make up more than half of Britain's over 2000 species of
butterflies and moths. Their miniature beauty and often intriguing life-cycles
fascinated Victorian lepidopterists - many of whom collected in Essex. Today
the Essex Field Club is fortunate to have one of the country's leading experts on
microlepidoptera as its resident recorder for this group of moths. A.M. Emmet
has combined a thorough search of the literature with the results of his own
extensive field-work, to produce the most complete guide to the micro-
lepidoptera yet published for any British county and the only guide to have a
full set of distribution maps.
A unique feature of this issue of the Essex Naturalist series, is the illustration
and description of each family and major subfamily of microlepidoptera - we
hope these will encourage many insect enthusiasts who are not yet expert in the
microlepidoptera to extend their interest in this group.
EDITORIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Essex Field Club gratefully acknowledges an interest free loan from the
Royal Society which has enabled us to publish this book. We also wish to thank
Messrs E.S.Bradford and E.P.Sayers for allowing us to use their beautiful
illustrations. The Amateur Entomologists' Society kindly agreed to us using
some of E.S. Bradford's illustrations which have previously appeared in the
AES Bulletin.
The editor gratefully acknowledges the help Mr E. Weedon and his staff in
the Reprographic Unit at N.E. London Polytechnic gave, during the editorial
attempts to master the art of typesetting.
THE BUTTERFLIES AND LARGER MOTHS OF ESSEX
The species of Lepidoptera not covered by The Smaller Moths of Essex are
included in A Guide to the Butterflies and Larger Moths of Essex by J. Firmin
et al. (1975). This publication is still available from the publishers (The Essex
Naturalists' Trust Ltd, Fingringhoe Wick, Colchester, Essex) at £2.50 plus
postage. The Essex Field Club plans to publish a supplementary list of the
butterflies and larger moths, which will include distribution maps and bring the
records up to date. Essex lepidopterists are urged to send in records of macro-
ledipotera to the Club's recorder - especially where these are additional to
records included in the 1975 publication.
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