FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



The business manager of the dictionary at that time was Dr. 

 Benjamin E. Smith. He had a cousin, Herbert H. Smith, who 

 was a great collector of insects and had made several expeditions 

 to South America and the West Indies, where he had got a vast 

 amount of material, some of which is now at Cornell University 

 and more at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. He also made 

 afterwards the collections on St. Vincent and Granada for the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science. The bulk 

 of that material is now in the British Museum of Natural His- 

 tory. It should be noted here that the Chalcididce of this St. 

 Vincent collection were afterwards monographed by Dr. W. H. 

 Ashmead and myself, that the Granada Chalcididce were turned 

 over to me, and that at a much later date I published a paper 

 on them in one of the English Transactions. 



Owing to this relationship between Benjamin E. Smith and 

 Herbert H. Smidi, Herbert had been employed at some en- 

 tomological definitions before I took hold. These occur only 

 in the first part of the original twenty-six parts of the dictionary. 



In talking over the general style of the definitions. Dr. Coues 

 made this extraordinary remark to me: "You need not confine 

 yourself to words actually in existence, but if you think of any 

 useful new word put it in," And this remark suggests a digres- 

 sion. Some years later. Professor E. B. Poulton, arriving in this 

 country from Oxford during one of Riley's frequent absences 

 from the United States, said to me, "By the way, Howard, Pro- 

 fessor Murray, while engaged in his work upon the great Oxford 

 Dictionary, has found certain words in the Century Dictionary 

 which he is unable to trace, and, knowing that I was coming 

 to this country, he wrote me a letter in which he said that these 

 words must have been invented by some Yankee schoolmaster 

 who had a penchant for invention and had seized the chance 

 'to inflict new atrocities upon the English language.' " And then 



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