24 MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY 



subject in more than one department. The actual teaching was 

 eventually carried on in Cambridge in connection with the other 

 biological sciences, the research connected with its applications to 

 agronomy and forestry was assigned to the Bussey Institution at 

 Forest Hills, its applications to tropical medicine and comparative 

 pathology to the Harvard Medical School and its taxonomic study 

 to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Since large collections of 

 carefully identified insects are absolutely essential to the develop- 

 ment of study and research in all fields of entomology, this Museum, 

 since its building by Louis Agassiz in 1 859, and the Museum of the 

 Boston Society of Natural History, since its foundation in 1831, have 

 been necessarily the permanent centers about which the activities of 

 all the academic and non-academic entomologists of Boston and its 

 vicinity have revolved in closer or more remote orbits. 



That there was some interest among the early colonists in the 

 natural history of insects as early as the seventeenth century is shown 

 by a portion of a letter from Benjamin BuUivant, of Boston, recording 

 some casual observations on fireflies, butterfly pupae and grasshop- 

 pers, addressed to James Pitiver of the Royal Society of London, and 

 published in the Transactions of the Society for 1698. The scientific 

 study of insects at Harvard, however, begins with William Dandridge 

 Peck (i 763-1 822), who, born in Boston as the son of a noted naval 

 architect, graduated from the Institution in 1782 and became its 

 first Professor of Natural History in 1805. It is said that he became 

 interested in natural history by reading a copy of Linnaeus' " Sys- 

 tema Naturae," cast up by a ship wrecked near his home at Kittery 

 Point, Maine. '^ As early as 1794 he published the first systematic 

 paper on zoology in America, a description of four remarkable fishes 

 taken near Piscataqua in New Hampshire. Soon afterwards he be- 

 came much interested in economic entomology and, between 1 795 

 and 1 81 9, published at least seven excellent studies of some of our 

 common insect pests, including the canker-worm, slug-worm, pine- 

 weevil, locust-borer, etc. The tradition in economic entomology, 

 however, was continued by one of Peck's students, Thaddeus Harris 

 (i 795-1856). He was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and gradu- 

 ated in 181 5. Although he became a practising physician, he gave up 

 his practice in 1831, when he was appointed Librarian of Harvard 



1 E. O. Essig, "A History of Entomology," 1931, p. 730. 



