54 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 84 



habits, sketched them in their different stages, and began to write 

 letters to the well known agricultural journal, The Prairie Farmer, 

 as early as May, 1863. In August of that year, the Colorado potato 

 beetle having reached Illinois, he wrote a description of its eggs and 

 figured and described the larvae for the first time, publishing his 

 article in The Prairie Farmer. At the age of 21 he moved to Chi- 

 cago and became connected with the paper, first as a reporter and 

 delineator, later as editor of the entomological department. Dur- 

 ing this time he got into correspondence with Walsh and ultimately 

 became intimately associated with him. 



His work was interrupted for a brief period in May, 1864, by his 

 enlistment as a private in the 134th Illinois Volunteer Regiment, in 

 which he served until it disbanded in November of the same year. 



In 1868, when he was 25 years old, the State of Missouri estab- 

 lished the position of State Entomologist, and, on Walsh's recom- 

 mendation, Riley received the appointment. He held this position 

 for nine years and published a series of annual reports which in 

 many ways were far ahead of anything of the sort that had been 

 (lone in this country. His illustrations were much better than any 

 that had been printed before ; the accoimts of the different insects 

 were based upon careful study ; the type was large and the print 

 good, and both the farmers and the entomologists were treated to a 

 kind of document that, taken all in all, was unequaled. The previ- 

 ously published reports by Glover, Fitch, and Walsh, with their 

 small type and inferior illustrations, suffered greatly in compari- 

 son, not so much in subject matter as in readability and attrac- 

 tiveness/ 



From 1874 to 1876 certain of the western States suffered greatly 

 from an invasion of the so-called Colorado grasshopper, or Rocky 

 Mountain locust, and this subject received careful treatment in 

 Riley's later reports. Moreover, during his Missouri residence the 

 outbreak of the grapevine Phylloxera in Europe attracted his seri- 

 ous attention, and he made important studies on this insect in the 

 United States which eventually resulted in the importation of the 



* Among some old papers, I have found recently Riley's memoranda of the 

 expense of making all of the illustrations in his Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and 

 Seventh Missouri Reports. A charge is entered against each illustration for the 

 cost of the wood-block, for the drawing on the wood, for the engraving and fof 

 the electrotype. The total cost of the 296 figures in these five reports was 

 J3,738.oo, an average of $12.50 per figure. Considering the very high character 

 of many of these illustrations, this amount seems absurdly small. Eighteen dol- 

 lars seems to be the limit for the engraving of a single figure, and the artist 

 who drew the figure on the block was allowed one-third as much as the engraver. 



