96 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ONTARIO. 



Illinois farm, he rose by his own exertions to distinction, and to become one of our most 

 useful citizens in science, both pure and applied. His nature was a manj^-sided one, 

 and his success in life was due to sheer will-power, unusual executive force, critical 

 judgment, untiring industry, skill with pencil and pen, and a laudable ambition, united 

 with an intense love of nature and of science for its own sake. This rare combination 

 of varied qualities, of which he made the most, rendered him during the thirty years of 

 hh active life widely known as a pablic official, aa a scientific investigator, while of 

 economic entomologists he was facile princeps. 



Charles Valentine Riley was born at Chelsea, London, September 18, 1843. His boy- 

 hood was spent at Walton-on-Thimas, where he made the acquaintance of the late W. C. 

 Hewitson, author of a work on butterflies, which undoubtedly developed his love for 

 insects. At the age of eleven he went to school for three years at Dieppe, afterwards 

 studying at Bonn-on-the Rhine. At both schools he carried off the first prizes for draw- 

 ing, making finished sketches of butterflies, thus showing his early bent for natural 

 history, and his teacher at Bonn urged him to study art at Paris. But it i3 said that 

 family circumstances, though rather, perhaps, a restless disposition, led him to abandon 

 the old country, and at the age of seventeen he had immigrated to Illinois, and settled on 

 a farm about fifty miles from Chicago. When about twenty-one he removed to Chicago, 

 where he became a reporter and editor of the entomological department of the Prairie 

 Farmer. 



Near the close of the war, in 1864, he enlisted as a private in the 134th Illinois 

 regiment, serving for six months, when he returned to his editorial office. 



He also enjoyed for several years the close friendship of B. D, Walsh, one of our 

 most thorough and philosophic entomologists, with whom he edited the American Entom- 

 ologist. His industry and versatility as well as his zeal as an entomologist, made him 

 widely known and popular, and gave him such prestige that it resulted in his appoint- 

 ment in 1868 as State Entomologist of Missouri. From that time until 1877, when he 

 left St. Louis to live in Washington, he issued a series of nine annual reports on injur- 

 ious insects, which showed remarkable powers of observation both of structure and habits, 

 great skill in drawing and especially ingenious and thoroughly practical devices and means 

 of destroying the pests. The reports were models and will never become stale. Darwin 

 wrote in 1871 : " There is a vast number of facts and generalizations of value to me, and 

 I am struck with admiration at your power of observation. The discussion on mimetic 

 insects seems to me particularly good and original." In reviewing the ninth and last of 

 these reports, published in 1876, the Entomologists' Monthly Magazine of London, 

 remarked : " The author, in giving full scope to his keen powers of observation, minute- 

 ness of detail, and the skill with which he uses his pencil, and at the same time in show- 

 ing a regard for that scientific accuracy — unfortunately too often neglected in works on 

 economic natural history — maintains his right to be termed the foremost economic 

 entomologist of the day." It goes without saying that tliis prestige existed to the end of 

 his life, his practical applications of remedies and inventions of apparatus giving him a 

 world wide reputation. In token of his suggestion of reviving the vines injured by the 

 Phylloxera by the importation of the American stock, he received a gold medal from the 

 French Government, and he afterwards received the cross of the Legion d'Honneur in 

 connection with the exhibit of the CJ. S. Department of Agriculture at the Paris Exposi- 

 tion of 1880. 



The widespread ravages of the Rocky Mountain locust from 1873 to 1877 had occas- 

 ioned such immense losses in several States and Territories that national aid was invoked 

 to avert the evil. The late Dr. F. V. Hayden, then in charge of the U. S, Geographical 

 and Geological Survey of the Territories, with his characteristic energy and sagacity, 

 initiated researches on the locust in the Territories. He sent Dr. P. R. Uhler to Colorado 

 in the summer of 1875, and also attached the present writer to the Survey who spent 

 over two months in entomological work in the same year in Colorado, Wyoming and 

 Utah, publishing the results in Hayden's Ninth Report Mr. Walsh had made import- 

 ant suggestions as to the birthplace and migrations of the insect. Meanwhile Riley had 



