THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



when I heard that some famous artist had made a statue of him 

 that has been placed somewhere on the campus. It did not seem 

 to me that a stove-pipe hat belonged on an artistic statue, but it 

 was impossible for me to think of the old gentleman without 

 that headgear. 



Of the pre-college days I think mainly of outdoor games and 

 of the boys with whom I played. Of the college days I think 

 also mainly of baseball, football and rowing, and of the boys 

 I knew in my own class and in the classes next to it. At that 

 time I was very greatly interested in the Ithaca Natural History 

 Society, which I had helped to found, and in my own collection 

 of insects, which gradually grew to contain a very fair local 

 representation of the butterflies, moths and grasshoppers. After 

 I entered college I found that Professor Comstock had brought 

 together a good collection of European books, many of them 

 old, and I read them hungrily. I was fascinated by Kirby and 

 Spence, by Rennie's "Insect Architecture," by Reamur's great 

 work, and especially by the wonderfully illustrated book by the 

 French writer Lyonnet on the anatomy of the Cossus. This insect 

 is a great wood-boring caterpillar that lives in the trunks of trees 

 in France. I was so fascinated by Lyonnet's engravings that I 

 began at once to study the anatomy of the large American cater- 

 pillars, and as a result, as already stated, my graduation thesis 

 was entitled, "The Respiratory System of the Larva of Corydalis 

 cornuta." 



Apropos of this anatomical work, I am tempted to tell a story. 

 Professor Riley, good entomologist that he was in many ways, 

 had apparently never paid much attention to insect anatomy, and 

 when in one of his latest Missouri reports he published an 

 illustration of one of the almost transparent larvae of the Grape- 

 vine Phylloxera, the tracheal system was plainly indicated. In 

 his text he referred to it as the nervous system. During the 



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