162 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST, 



else in the New World. Here, in the last century, Peek studied the 

 Cankerworm and the Slug-worm of the Cherry, and, in late years, Rhyn- 

 chaenus, Stenocorus, and Cossus — all highly destructive insects. Here lived 

 Harris, who cultivated entomology in its broadest sense, and whose classic 

 treatise was the first important Government publication on injurious insects. 

 Here, to-day, we have two associations for our work, consisting, it will be 

 confessed, of nearly the same individuals, and not many of them, but 

 meeting frequently — one in Boston, the other in Cambridge. Harvard 

 acknowledges the claims of our -study in supporting not only an instructor 

 in entomology at its Agricultural School, but a full professor of the same 

 in the University at large. 



Harris attributed to Peck his special interest in entomology, and his 

 first paper, that on the Salt-marsh Caterpillar, appeared in the Massachu- 

 setts Agricultural Repository only four years after Peck's last, in the same 

 magazine, on Cherry and Oak Insects. How many of us have drawn our 

 first inspirations from Harris ? Yet probably not one of our local ento- 

 mologists ever saw him. The general direction of Harris's studies doubt- 

 less arose from the predilections of his instructor ; and the unprecedented 

 growth of economic entomology in this country, where it flourishes as 

 nowhere else, must be credited primarily to the influence of Harris's work. 

 With every temptation which the wealth of new material about him could 

 give, or which a very extensive correspondence with naturalists devoting 

 themselves almost exclusively to systematic work, like Say, would naturally 

 foster, he wisely followed the bent given his studies by his early training 

 under Peck, and left a better example and a more generous and enduring 

 influence. 



In our own day, the spreading territory of the United States, the pene- 

 tration of its wilds, and the intersection of its whole area by routes of 

 travel, the wider distribution and greatly increased numbers of local ento- 

 mologists, as well as the demand for our natural products abroad, have set 

 also before us the same temptation to study only new forms and to culti- 

 vate descriptive work, to the neglect of the choicer, broader fields of an 

 ever-opening scierce. It is this danger to which I venture briefly to call 

 your attention to-day, not by way of disparaging the former, but rather in 

 the hope that some of our younger members, who have not yet fallen into 

 the ruts of work, may be induced to turn their attention to some of the 

 more fruitful fields of diligent research. 



We should not apply the term descriptive work merely to the study of 



