16 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



vehicle at present, and such is the ambition of European ento 

 mologists to anticipate Americans, that I willing^ yield to the 

 solicitations of several friends in publishing what may possi 

 bly contain many new species; and in doing so I am not actu 

 ated so much by personal considerations as a desire to aid 

 several young entomologists in this vicinity, and by the wish 

 to promote American science in general: pro patria. The 

 ' Farmer ' is taken at New Harmony, and will therefore 

 come under the eye of Prof. Say. It is my intention, after these 

 descriptions shall have undergone his rigid scrutiny, to repub- 

 lish them, either by themselves or in some respectable scien 

 tific journal." And the same Dr. Harris had, a short time 

 previously, informed the same Prof. Hentz (see letter of Har 

 ris to Hentz, January 19, 1827), that the Journal of the Acad 

 emy of Natural Sciences, of Philadelphia, was sadly in need 

 of MS., adding: "If you could assist the publishers of the 

 journal in this emergency by accounts of any of your unde- 

 scribed objects of natural history, you will do them a thank 

 ful service, and they will furnish engravings for such drawings 

 as you may send." Harris never kept his promise to repub- 

 lish these papers in a more accessible form, and they remained 

 unknown until 1869, when they were reprinted by Scudder. 

 Fitch also hid some of his purely technical papers so that they 

 practically remained inaccessible; one of them, that on Winter 

 Insects, has lately been reprinted by Lintner, while another, 

 the ' ' Catalogue of Homopterous Insects, ' ' ought to be repub- 

 lished. Walsh again sinned in this respect, but he was con 

 siderate enough to republish himself the papers in question in 

 the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. 

 This custom has, unfortunately, not ceased in our time, and in 

 spite of the fact that entomological and other natural history 

 journals go around begging for MS., as they did in olden 

 times, an occasional technical paper is printed in what is but 

 little better than a newspaper. I do not see that this custom 

 has ever prevailed to any extent among the European ento 

 mologists, although much annoyance and inconvenience in the 

 literature has been caused there by the practice of certain 

 authors of issuing papers on separately printed sheets, without 



