THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



Poulton showed me the list. He was surprised when I told him 

 that I was the man who wrote the definitions, but he was still 

 more surprised when, after looking at the list of words, I told 

 him that I had found them all in Kirby and Spence, a classical 

 English work published about 1834. I wrote an explanation to 

 Professor Murray, and received a courteous reply, but he evi- 

 dently never knew that I had seen his letter to Poulton. 



I think I will allow myself to step aside from the dictionary 

 for a moment. When I first came to Washington, in the fall 

 of 1878, I brought with me, among other letters of introduction, 

 one to Dr. Coues from Burt G. Wilder. I called on him and was 

 received pleasantly. After chatting a few moments, I told him 

 that I was assisting Riley, and then left. As it happened, while 

 working with Wilder and Gage during my post-graduate year at 

 Cornell, I had become much interested in the general subject of 

 vestigial structures, inspired by one I had found while dissecting 

 a still-born infant. I had looked up the general subject in the 

 University Library and had started a small card catalogue of such 

 structures. I had, I think, twenty or thirty references. When it 

 appeared during the spring of 1879 that Riley was likely to use 

 me quite as much as a clerk as a laboratory assistant, I thought 

 about going back into medicine, and called on Dr. Coues again 

 to see if he could give me further references to this anatomical 

 line of work. I found him in a bad humor, in an office across 

 Pennsylvania Avenue — on Tenth Street, I think. He received me 

 brusquely and I explained my errand. "Oh, why? I thought you 

 were an entomologist and not an anatomist." I held out my 

 twenty or thirty cards, and he said, "Humph, do you call that 

 a bibliography? Look here" — and he pointed to an array of 

 card cases — "here are twenty thousand cards, forming my bibli- 

 ography of North American birds." I was very much abashed 



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