WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 45 



as finished and as valuable as anything that Riley ever wrote and 

 were more complete than anything that Harris did. 



Fitch's personality must have been very attractive. He was a tall, 

 stout, amiable man, who for the most part lived quietly at home work- 

 ing with insects and preparing his reports and articles. Comstock 

 visited him in the early 1870's, and in an after-dinner speech at the 

 entomologists' dinner at Toronto, December 30, 1921 (Journal of 

 Economic Entomology, Vol. 15, p. 32), told briefly of this visit. He 

 said: 



I found him a very genial old gentleman. He was, as you know, a practicing 

 physician, and like many country physicians he had an office building out to 

 one side in his yard, a little square building, and in that was a really remarkable 

 entomological library. When I talked with him about methods and how to go 

 to work, he said, " The way to do is to sit down and study an insect." That 

 is what I got from him. But it has always been a blessed memory to have seen 

 that grand old man. 



In the fall of 1870, Riley and P. R. Uhler spent a day with Fitch 

 at " Fitch's Point." Riley describes him as a strong and very tall man 

 who had become quite round-shouldered while stooping in the pur- 

 suit of his studies, and as having a noticeable contrast in the appear- 

 ance of his left eye as compared with his right one. He was " genial, 

 enthusiastic, unassuming." 



From 1 87 1 to 1879 he lived quietly at home and was unable to 

 prepare any matter for publication. He gave up his correspondence 

 with other scientific workers, and was practically lost to the entomo- 

 logical world. After his death, Sanborn and Lintner visited Salem 

 for the purpose of examining material left behind. Aside from the 

 very large collections, which afterwards found a divided resting 

 place, at Cambridge and at Washington, they record the finding of 

 148 note-books with full descriptions and remarks about the majority 

 of the New York species. The number of specimens referred to in 

 the note-books reached 55,000. 



Fitch was a religious man. Why is it that those old, simple, true 

 naturalists, almost without exception, were men of deep religious 

 feeling? The modern scientific man does not possess this mental char- 

 acteristic. Fitch and Harris belonged to the type exemplified by dear 

 old Kirby, the Rector of Barham. All three of these men combined 

 with their love of nature the love of nature's God. It is related by 

 Doctor Fitch's daughter that, in the course of evening prayers one 

 night, the good old gentleman was reading to the assembled family 

 his customary chapter from the Bible, when a moth, attracted by the 

 light, dropped on the open page of the Good Book. Here was a 



