PROC. ENT. SOC. WASH., VOL. 23, NO. 4, APRIL, 1921 81 



grammar and for this reason Mr. Dow says "His education was 

 limited. His grammatical blunders would be unpardonable in 

 any grade above elementary school." I do not agree with Mr. 

 Dow in his deductions from this evidence; in point of fact I 

 have known college-bred men who could not or did not express 

 themselves on paper nearly so well as Abbot has done in this 

 communication. The errors noted may evince, in my opinion, 

 the careless lapses of a fairly well educted person, and may 

 possibly have been due to Abbot's lack of contact with educated 

 persons for long periods of time, or even to the approach of 

 senility. Witness, for instance, the following passages from this 

 epistle: "I find it very difficult to know what insects are rare 

 and what are common, " "Every year I have observed 



some very few kinds to be plenty," and again, 



'There is a gentleman in Savannah who wanted me to make an 

 Herbarium for him but I was very seriously indis- 



posed in the spring. " This does not seem to be the language of 

 illiteracy; the occasional capitalization of the nouns which may 

 be noted in Abbot's letter is a relic of the middle English usage 

 which at that time was fading out of the literature but which may 

 be noted in the extracts from Catesby which have already been 

 given. The records of the London Society of Artists show that 

 John Abbot exhibited still life studies about the year 1770 and 

 it seems quite probable that this was the work of John Abbot 

 the entomologist of whom we have been speaking. 



During the period of 27 years elapsing between the appearance 

 of Abbot's work and the first edition of Say's Entomology, no 

 illustrated work of importance dealing with American insect's 

 .seems to have appeared (with the exception of the brief papers 

 by W. D. Peck). The first edition of Say's work was published 

 in 1824, and curiously enough the title page bears the following 

 announcement: "Illustrated by Colored Figures from Original 

 Drawings executed from Nature by Thomas Say." This amus- 

 ing error was subsequently corrected in the Leconte edition of 

 the work, and in view of the warm friendship known to have 

 existfed between Say and at least some of his illustrators, it must 

 be viewed as a mere error of the types. The most prominent 

 illustrator of Say's work was Titian Ramsey Peale, born in 

 Philadelphia in 1800 and who died there March 13, 1885. 

 Peale executed the first plates for Say's Entomology when but 

 16 years of age and these were printed in 1817, although the 

 first edition of the work did not appear until 1824. T. R. Peak 

 was later curator of the Philadelphia Museum and left a collec- 

 tion of Lepidoptera which is preserved in the Academy of 

 Natural Sciences at Philadelphia. He was a distinguished 

 naturalist as well as an artist and accompanied the \Yilkes 

 South Sea exploring expedition as naturalist in 1S3S 42. He 

 was also the author of most of the plates for Bonaparte's Ameri- 



