More than ten years ago, I published some notes on the taxonomy of Surinam millipedes. My intention then was to describe and record in a series of papers the material of Diplopoda in the collections of the Amsterdam and Leiden Museums, and to give a survey of the millipede fauna of Surinam. However, as this work progressed it became evident that the monographs and revisions by the authors of the previous generation were only too often a quite unreliable basis for the project planned, and that descriptions of new species were rather useless if not preceded by at least partial revisions of the nomenclature and systematics of the genera or even families involved.