Summary: Who hasn't spent a few lazy moments sitting by a pond or stream watching those lovely, gauzy-winged insects called "dragonflies" and "damselflies"? And we have all wondered if these beautiful creatures had descriptive common names or only multi-syllabled scientific ones. The difficulty arose from the fact that the last comprehensive monograph on these insects dated back to the 1950's, and no one had seen the need to create a list of common names that would be accepted by academic students of dragonflies and damselflies. Thus the many naturalists curious about the dragonflies and damselflies they saw on their adventures were at a loss for names until the last decade. The common names no...
