14 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



extras known at that time the writings of the earlier entomolo 

 gists became practically inaccessible a few years after they 

 were published. This had, of course, a great, depressing in 

 fluence upon the development of entomological science in 

 America. The writers, up to the middle of the present century, 

 are full of complaint at the difficulty and impossibility of be 

 coming acquainted with the literature, and this inaccessibility 

 of the early literature is certainly characteristic of American 

 entomology. The few persons that persevered in the study of 

 entomology had to take recourse to a most desperate means to 

 remedy this evil, viz : to copy the writings of Say, Harris, 

 and even later authors when they had occasion to visit large 

 libraries. The many manuscript volumes filled with such 

 copies, and made by the younger Melsheimer and by Dr. Fitch, 

 are mementoes of the difficulties under which the study of en 

 tomology labored at their time ; and even now, I think, many 

 of us, especially those who have dwelled in the West, have 

 done, more or less, a little copying of older papers so as to be 

 able to refer to them. An interesting illustration of this diffi- 

 culty s may be found in Dr. Morris' " Contributions to the His 

 tory of Entomology in the United States (1844)," where, in 

 order to be able to give a list of Say's writings, he was obliged 

 to copy a list published in Kngland by Doubleday in 1839. 

 Of Harris' papers Morris was able to enumerate only eighteen 

 numbers (up to 1844, when Harris was still living and working), 

 while Scudder, in 1869, could enumerate fifty-one numbers up to 

 1844. Hagen's Bibliotheca, published in 1862, gives ninety-one 

 numbers as the total of Harris' writings, while Scudder, seven 

 years later, was able to give one hundred and five, one of these 

 papers still being lost, and only known from the title. In our 

 times some of these old authors are not more readily accessible, 

 but their writings are no longer of such importance to us as they 

 were to the entomologists of forty or fifty years ago. Moreover, 

 we have now reprints of some of the most inaccessible papers, 

 and more especially of those of Say. Very few persons who 

 us.e the L,eConte edition of Say are aware that they handle a 

 unicum in entomological literature, for although single works 

 or articles by various authors have been reproduced on many 



