WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 7I 



ology. It is an interesting fact that David Starr Jordan, a senior, 

 attended these lectures by Comstock, a sophomore. 



This very early teaching of entomology with especial reference to 

 its economic aspects (almost the earliest in this country) deserves 

 some consideration. Conscious of his own lack of training and of 

 broad knowledge of entomology and agriculture, Comstock, tremen- 

 dously interested as he was in the subject, naturally wished, not only 

 for his own good but for that of his fellow students, to bring out 

 the importance of work in this direction as strongly as possible, and 

 he arranged with the university authorities to bring the young and 

 able and already famous C. V. Riley to Ithaca for two or three lec- 

 tures. Riley, I believe, had already given such lectures by invitation 

 at the Kansas State Agricultural College at Manhattan, and when 

 he came to Ithaca he attracted a large audience of students in the 

 different branches of natural history, of the teachers in the agricul- 

 tural faculty, of some of the neighboring farmers, and of the hand- 

 ful of town boys who were interested in insects. 



I was one of the latter, about 14 years old, and I was greatly im- 

 pressed by Professor Riley's picturesque appearance (he was tall, 

 slender, romantic in appearance, with long wavy hair and a luxuriant 

 moustache, looking much more like an Italian artist than like an Amer- 

 ican economic entomologist). I was not especially impressed by his 

 lectures, since he was not a good speaker, but was charmed by his 

 wonderful ability to illustrate his lectures with blackboard drawings. 

 His crayon sketches were very clever, and if I remember rightly he 

 had acquired the faculty of drawing with both hands at the same 

 time, a method which I think was brought to America by the elder 

 xAgassiz and pushed almost into an art by E. S. Morse, one of his 

 early students. 



Packard's Guide to the Study of Insects had recently been pub- 

 lished, and Packard had a very considerable following among natu- 

 ralists in his ideas as to the number of Orders and large points in the 

 classification of insects. I remember that Riley took an undue time in 

 expressing his own ideas on such questions, which not only had little 

 interest to his audience but which the older men, especially Profes- 

 sor Wilder, considered to be in very bad taste coming from a mere 

 economic entomologist as opposed to the ideas of a trained student 

 of the Agassiz school. On the whole, the lectures were disappointing 

 except for the admirable way in which they were illustrated, and 

 those of us who attended solely from our interest in what may be 

 called the natural history point of view got very little from them. 



