ACADEMY OF SCONCES.] BIOGRAPHY. 85 



recalls his tall handsome form and the strong interesting features so wonderfully relieved by 

 the happy soul that seemed ever ready to burst forth ha a bright flash of interest over any and 

 all things of that manifold nature to the observation of which his life had been devoted. 



He was the author of 791 scientific publications, chiefly systematic descriptions of Lepidop- 

 tera, Orthoptera, Neuroptera, Hemiptera and Coleoptera, and devoting special attention to 

 fossil forms. 



Yet such a brief summary gives a wholly imperfect idea of the wide scope of his interests, 

 much less of the sunny charm of his more popular writings which always seemed to have caught 

 the generous cheer of a June day of his native New England. 



He was perhaps the only man of science in America who could write a deeply technical 

 work upon Lepidoptera and at the same time without incongruity crowd the volumes with quo- 

 tations from poetry and with popular excursuses upon all manner of fascinating subjects related 

 to New England and its butterflies. Yet such is his incomparable three volume work upon the 

 "Butterflies of the eastern United States and Canada with special reference to New England." 

 He proposed popular names for at least 77 species of American butterflies and curiously so aptly 

 chosen were these that most of them are now better known to the American public than are the 

 older scientific designations which they supplanted in the popular imagination. Among his 

 interesting discoveries he showed that Basilarchia proserpina is a hybrid between B. arthemis 

 and B. astyanax. Also that we now have stranded as it were upon Mount Washhigton, N. H., 

 and on Pikes Peak and other high mountains of Colorado above 12,000 feet, a butterfly (Oeneis 

 semidea) which hi the glacial epoch was widely spread over the Northern States but upon the 

 retreat of the ice became confined to these two isolated regions. He also demonstrated that the 

 group-genus Papilo is composed of butterflies of relatively primitive organization, and more 

 closely related to the Hesperidse than to the more recent and highly specialized Nymphalinas. 



The migrations, feeding habits, life histories, geographical distribution, dimorphism, morph- 

 ology, and early larval and egg characters are all most philosophically yet fascinatingly dealt 

 with in this great work which, had he produced no other, would have made him one of the world's 

 leading entomologists. But he was the author of many other voluminous works which from the 

 standpoint of systematic zoology, or paleontology were even more important. 



The following list may give some rough idea of the extent of his activities and of the enor- 

 mous energy he possessed. The numbers represent the number of papers he published upon 

 each subject: 



Lepidoptera, 168; Orthoptera, 180; fossil insects, 122; anatomy of insects, 19; evolution, 

 15; geographical distribution, 29; biographical, 25; reviews, 63; geological, 13; general ento- 

 mological subjects, 85; habits of insects, 24; catalogues and lists of species, 28; nomenclature, 8; 

 geography and exploration, 16; economic entomology, 17; embryology of insects, 6; songs of 

 insects, 6; ethnology, 4; food plants of insects, 4; regeneration in insects, 2; public questions, 2; 

 mammals, 1; fishes, 1; Crustacea, 1; mollusca, 1. 



It is remarkable that in his first paper, published immediately after leaving Williams 

 College, he enumerates 28 species of snails, yet of all his following zoological papers only 7 

 are upon subjects other than insects. On the other hand, almost all the accurate knowledge 

 we possess of American grasshoppers, cockroaches and crickets, and of fossil insects is due to 

 Scudder. Indeed, according to Cockerell, the original descriptions of 1,884 species of animals 

 are found in Scudder's writings. Of these 1,144 species and 233 genera are fossil insects, and 

 630 species and 106 genera are living Orthoptera, the remainder being chiefly fossil arachnids 

 and myriopods, Coleoptera and the living butterflies of North America. 



Scudder believed that generic names should be used to indicate differences rather than to 

 show relationships. He was thus one of the type of systematists known as "splitters," and 

 nowhere does this tendency appear in his works in a more accentuated degree than in his 

 treatment of the generic names of butterflies. 



Naturally in the vast mass of his writings, especially upon fossil insects, which must often 

 be described from mere fragments, there are mistakes, many of which he himself corrected as 



