HISTORY 25 



College, a position which he retained during the remainder of his 

 life. While thus engaged, he gave a private course or what we should 

 now call a "seminar" in entomology, at which attendance was vol- 

 untary. ^ Like Peck he was greatly interested in the applied aspects of 

 entomology, and published a long series of important papers on in- 

 sect pests. This work culminated in his classical "Treatise of Some of 

 the Insects Injurious to Vegetation," to which I have referred. 

 Though Dr. L. O. Howard, in his very entertaining "History of Ap- 

 plied Entomology," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 1930, 

 gives the impression of having no great enthusiasm for Harvard en- 

 tomologists, he could not refrain from paying the following tribute to 

 Thaddeus Harris: "Harris was a learned scholar, a man of good 

 birth and sound breeding, a lover of nature, and one of the best ex- 

 amples of a high type that New England produced a hundred years 

 or more ago. Quite the most beautiful appreciation of his character 

 and of his work that has been published was done by A. R. Grote in 

 his paper entitled 'The Rise of Practical Entomology in America,' 

 published in the Twentieth Annual Report of the Entomological 

 Society of Ontario in 1899. It is so beautiful a bit of writing that it 

 deserves a place in literature, and it is so high an appreciation of 

 Harris that it should be read by every entomologist. The Memoir of 

 Harris, by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which prefaces 

 Scudder's 'Entomological Correspondence of Thaddeus William 

 Harris, M.D.,' should be read in connection with Grote's charming 

 paper. No one who reads these two papers will ever think of Harris 

 except with admiration, deep respect, and affection. 



"From Colonel Higginson's account it appears that, while per- 



1 According to Dow ("The Work and Times of Dr. Harris," Bull. Brooklyn 

 Entom. Soc, VHI, 1913, p. 108). "For five years from 1837 Dr. Harris filled a 

 vacancy in the Chair of Natural History, giving a course of lectures twice a week 

 to the senior class. Not satisfied with this, he organized an evening class for 

 voluntary attendance, which was, in fact, something like the Entomological 

 Societies of today, with one speaker having the floor most of the time. John W. 

 Randall, a senior from Maine, attended these meetings. He turned to beetles 

 which were also Harris' favorites, and collected near Cambridge during the 

 academic season and in Maine during vacation. Two papers were the result of 

 his efforts, in which 87 new species were described. Randall became a physician 

 but never reappeared as a coleopterist. Years later his papers were edited by 

 P. S. Sprague and E. P. Austin, who reidentified the species, of which 47 are 

 saved from synonymy." 



