THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



bright little fellow, talented investigator and clever artist that 

 he was, died in 1918 from a disease contracted, curiously enough, 

 from the bite of an insect in Brazil years before. The mass of 

 descriptive work that had been done in different countries was 

 appalling. I applied to the Carnegie Institution for permission to 

 prepare for publication an entire revision of the monograph, 

 but finally, after a number of years, received a notification that 

 but one more volume could be issued, and that this was to be 

 entirely taxonomic in its character. This was not what I wanted, 

 but it was much better than nothing, and Dr. Dyar, who had 

 been keeping up his work all this time, prepared a large volume 

 revising the classification and including many new species, and 

 including also in its geographic scope the entire continent of 

 South America. This the Carnegie Institution published in excel- 

 lent shape under the title, "Mosquitoes of the Americas." This 

 appeared toward the close of 1929 under the sole authorship 

 of Dr. Dyar, who died soon after. 



Harrison Gray Dyar was probably the best posted man on 

 the classification of mosquitoes of his time, with the possible 

 exception of F. W. Edwards, of the British Museum of Natural 

 History. It may be worth while to tell how Dyar became in- 

 terested in mosquitoes. He had graduated at the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology and had studied bacteriology at 

 Columbia University, New York, under T. Mitchell Prudden, 

 gaining his Doctorate in Philosophy by a thesis on the air of 

 New York City. He had always been interested in caterpillars, 

 and in his idle moments in the summers had worked out a 

 classification of these worms (larvse of lepidoptera) . In the 

 summer of 1902, he was, I think, down at Woods Hole, Massa- 

 chusetts, when he saw my book on mosquitoes, which had just 

 appeared. He was struck with the illustrations of the larvs of 

 Anopheles, and soon after found some of these in a horse trough. 



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