S. Mahunka szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 61. (Budapest, 2000)

Austria but mainly in South Hungary. He built up a collection in Pécs, when he served there, and later another one in Kalocsa. Unfortunately, he did not label a part of the specimens properly. Later he knew definitely which of the specimens were from the Pécs collection and which one from the Kalocsa collection. Consequently, his note "Pécs" does not always mean the city Pécs or the vicinity of Pécs (which would be a matter of course) but his Pécs collection. The same applies also for "Kalocsa". This fact was repeatedly mentioned to us by the late Ferenc Mihályi and Árpád Soós, when we talked about the history of dipterology of our country. Otherwise Thalhammer left a smaller part of his Diptera collection in Pécs. The Anthrenus larvae destroyed it, since nobody cared it in a secondary school collection (Dr. M. Wéber, pers. comm.). In the eastern edge of the historical part of Pécs there is a lime stone mine closed long ago (mining started in the Roman ages) with some very productive karst-spring streams. The area's name is Tettye. Tettye plateau and a ca. 1 km long valley had a special warm and humid climate due to the spring and human impact. The basis for manufacture industry was provided by about 40 small water mills, i.e. the Tettye brook had an important role. In addition to a number of the smaller type plant, series of mills powered by water fall in the karst spring stream of Tettye were set up in 14

th century. The water energy used not only the millers, but the other manufacture as well black smiths, as Bosnian tanners and other professions. So Thalhammer could collect in this special humid habitat. The brook was canalised and covered at the end of the 19

th century. The historical picturesque structure of this Tettye district has remained until now. However, the manufactures have already been closed, the source of the special humid microclimate did not exists any longer. When transporting Thalhammer's collection from Kalocsa to the Természettudományi Múzeum Budapest in (?) 1955, Árpád Soós received also his had-written collection register (catalogue), which is now preserved in the library of the Diptera collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. Thalhammer made this list not much before his death; that time he had suffered from Parkinson's disease and so his writing was trembling though readable in almost every word. The page where the "Orphnephilidae" of his collection was listed, is given as Fig. 1. Only in the minority of the species he also gave the number of specimens (or those are the numbers of species in a group, we do not know), written with pencil on the right. Fortunately this is the case with the two thaumaleid species: so he had specimens of obscura from "Styria" and two specimens of testacea from "Pécs" in his original collection (as a matter of course with old records of Thaumaleidae, we do not know the true identity of those specimens). He listed two species of "Orphnephila HAL." in the Diptera part of the Fauna Regni Hungáriáé (under "Farn. BLEPHAROCERIDAE"): "testacea Ruthe" and "nigra Lw". None of the specimens are from the present Hungary (Tátra, Mehádia, Bucsecs), and, what is even more interesting for our present theme, the specimens were not from his collection (cf. Fig. 1). It is almost sure that he simply had no specimen of Thaumalea by 1899 in his collection. Later he collected some in Austria and also somewhere in the Mecsek Mts near Pécs (see below). Zilahi-Sebess (1960) published a booklet on six nematoceran families in the "Magyarország Állatvilága", Fauna Hungáriáé series, inch "Thaumaleidae - Hajlószárnyú muslicák". In that booklet he keyed four Thaumalea species ("divaricata EDW.", "Thalhammeri Z.-SEB.", "testacea RUTHE", "austriaca EDW."), all from Pécs, and other three species which he reported from the other parts of the Carpathian Basin ("obscura ZETT.", "nigra LOEW", "rumanica EDW."). Earlier he described (1956) a new species of Thaumalea from Thalhammer's collection as from "Pécs,...". It is more than obvious that