Introduction 



E 



iFTEEN years ago I used my spare time for several weeks in 

 writing about thirty thousand words in which I gave a sort of 

 record of my Hfe, but this was my personal story and I did it for 

 my daughters' reading. It so happened that once my mother 

 wrote, largely from her mother's dictation, the story of her 

 mother's life, and that later she wrote a long account of her 

 own. So this little story of mine, added to the two that my 

 mother did, carries the personal records and family incidents 

 through three generations, covering considerably more than a 

 hundred years, since my grandmother was born in 1800. There 

 are a lot of things in the three stories that might be of interest 

 to others, and if anyone wishes to consult these manuscripts 

 for historical or other reasons, I am sure that my daughters will 

 be very willing. 



And now there comes a somewhat imaginative publisher who 

 thinks that "The Story of an Entomologist" might be done in 

 a very readable way. He has evidently read about some of the 

 big and interesting things that have been done by entomologists 

 and that have come from the study of insects by men who have 

 devoted their lives to this study. I am sure that he has no interest 



[v] 



