During recent curatorial activities in our Calliphorid collection I came across the type-series of Calliphora nigribarbis Snellen van Vollenhoven, 1863. The series consists of four specimens, which had been labelled as syntypes by me at an earlier occasion. They belong unmistakably to one lot, although only two bear identical, original, printed labels reading "V. Siebold/Japan". All four have a second handwritten label with the scientific name, "Calliphora nigribarbis v. Voll.", and a last printed line "Coll. F. M. v. d. Wulp". These latter labels were also put on by me, in 1965, when rearranging the Diptera collection of our museum and are nothing more than an indication that the specimens concerned came from one of the old cabinets originating from, at least, the times of F. M. van der Wulp. These cabinets contained wooden drawers with loose glass covers with the label and specimen pins forced straight into the bare wooden bottom, no soft bottom-plates being present. Specimens in this old collection were placed below blackrimmed labels bearing the specific name, while names of higher categories (genera and families) were written on separate, hand-written, red-rimmed labels. Thus the actual specimen pins were unlabelled — a very archaic and unsatisfactory situation —, while some of the specimens had no label at all, because in the case of longer series only the first and last specimens had a locality-label. When transferring the specimens to modern drawers I provided every specimen with a new identification label, so as to preserve their then identification. The four syntypes of Calliphora nigribarbis apparently comprise the complete material of this species. Snellen van Vollenhoven (1863: 17-18) mentions only four specimens from Japan, collected by Von Siebold. The four