March, 1914.] Dow: JOHN AbBOT. 69 



A recent sketch of the career of Dr. Thaddeus \V. Harris, of Har- 

 vard University, and of his entomological association inspired a fresh 

 search into the archives kept by that eminent pioneer in the attic 

 of his late residence in Cambridge. The first result was a neatly 

 tied package of about 200 letters, dated 1825 to 1835, from entomolo- 

 gists all over the world. Later, many hundred, received by his father, 

 Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, author of a Natural History of the 

 Bible, were discovered. The two letters reproduced here are by the 

 courtesy of Edward Doubleday Harris, son of Dr. Harris and a 

 member of the Xew York Entomological Society. They are given 

 literatim, for to correct a misspelled word would be a historical 

 crime. 



Dr. Oemler is the source of most of our knowledge of Abbot. 

 He bought what he considered the best collection of Abbot drawings 

 in existence, the one now in the Boston Society of Natural History. 

 The Leconte collection remains to be rediscovered. 



Rev. T. M. Harris, fatigued with the enormous labor of classifying 

 the correspondence and documents of Geo. Washington for the 

 history of Jared Sparks, and contemplating a new edition of the 

 Natural History of the Bible, visited Savannah. Here he learned 

 from Dr. Oemler of Abbot, the remarkable delineator and breeder of 

 insects and went to see him. Hence the correspondence, of which 

 six letters have so far been discovered. The two presented here need 

 no farther annotation. The misspellings of Dr. Oemler are, of course, 

 explained by the unfamiliarity of a German with a few English 

 words. The misspellings of Abbot reveal the man. 



IMajor John Eatton Leconte, father of the Greatest Coleopterist, and 

 himself an entomologist outranked only by Harris and Say, was not dis- 

 posed to be communicative about his sources of specimens or draw- 

 ings, for, although he knew Harris well from 1830, he did not mention 

 his Georgia discovery. Leconte came of a Georgia family, and both 

 his father and brother were ardent botanists on their Georgia planta- 

 tion. No fellow botanist could live in that state without discovery 

 by the Lecontes, who were people of wealth, power, culture and 

 wide acquaintance. 



