HISTORY 23 



students. Most of these teachers evidently resembled Mark Hop- 

 kins in their preference for very small classes, but instead of sitting on 

 a log and exchanging abstractions with a student, they preferred 

 setting to work with him and investigating the insect fauna of the log.^ 

 The growth and differentiation of entomological science at Har- 

 vard, during more than a century, naturally led to the pursuit of the 



1 Some of those who have recently attempted to write the history of ento- 

 mology in the United States seem to have been led astray by a failure to appre- 

 ciate the pedagogical importance of such companionate research. Professor 

 Escherich, to mention only one example, in his history of applied entomology in 

 the United States ("Die angewandte Entomologie in den Vereinigten Staaten," 

 1 91 3, p. 68 nota), after remarking that "the first professor of Entomology at an 

 American University was our countryman Dr. H. A. Hagen," quotes the follow- 

 ing passage from a paper by the late Professor J. H. Comstock ("The Present 

 Methods of Teaching Entomology," Journ. Econ. Entom., 4, 191 1, pp. 53-67): 

 " Although Dr. Hagen came to the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1870, his 

 first course of lectures was given in the summer of 1873, and his class consisted of 

 a single student, the writer of this paper. That was a course of lectures never to 

 be forgotten by the one who heard it. It was a very hot summer, and Dr. Hagen 

 suffered with the heat. About nine o'clock each morning he would come into 

 the laboratory, say a cheery good morning, take off his coat and hang it back of 

 the door, take off his vest and put it with his coat, take a seat by a small table, 

 light a German pipe with a very long flexible stem, place the bowl of the pipe on 

 the floor behind him, take a few puffs, and then say, ' Come and I will tell you 

 some dings what I know.' The student would then take a seat on the opposite 

 side of the table, and the professor, with sheets of paper before him, which served 

 the purpose of a blackboard, would take up the subject where it had been 

 dropped the previous morning." Since Comstock later became a great teacher 

 of entomology at Cornell and trained many entomologists, including Dr. L. O. 

 Howard, for many years the head of our Federal Bureau of Entomology, the 

 casual reader might infer from Escherich's remarks that Hagen's German in- 

 fluence on entomology and especially on economic entomology in America was 

 profound. But those of us who knew Professor Comstock intimately are ac- 

 quainted with another of his anecdotes which proves that before he went to 

 Cornell and later to Harvard he had been inspired to take up the study of in- 

 sects by reading Thaddeus Harris' famous work on "Some Insects Injurious to 

 Vegetation," first published in 1841 and after various editions issued in its final 

 form in 1862, with beautiful wood-cuts and colored steel-engravings executed 

 under the supervision of Louis Agassiz. Now Harris, while acting as librarian of 

 Harvard College, is known to have given a private course in entomology as early 

 as 1837 to 1842, and had been a student of William Peck, our first native born 

 American entomologist and first professor of natural history at Harvard (from 

 1805 to 1822: vide infra). To regard Hagen, therefore, as the first professor of 

 entomology in the United States means merely that even by the middle of the 

 nineteenth century the science had become so vast and intricate as to require 

 all an investigator's time and energies. Previously, as above stated, entomology 

 had been a branch of natural history, but this does not imply that the subject had 

 not been taught at Harvard. 



