February, '16J OBITUARY 23^ 



Obituary 



FRANCIS MARION WEBSTER 



Economic entomology has suffered a severe loss in the sudden death* 

 January 3, 1916, of Francis Marion Webster, head of the division of 

 cereal and forage crop insect investigations in the United States 

 Bureau of Entomology. He was attacked by pneumonia while in 

 attendance upon the national scientific meetings held during the Christ- 

 mas hohdays at Columbus, 0., and died of heart failure within four 

 days. 



His record as an entomologist is probably unparalleled in this coun- 

 try as an example of unusual success and usefulness won against heavy 

 initial handicaps. Born in New Hampshire in 1849, he came, when 

 four years of age, with his parents to De Kalb county in northern 

 Ilhnois, where he passed his boyhood on a farm. The death of his 

 father when he was fifteen years old left him largely to his own re- 

 sources, and he had little formal education. Marrying at twenty-one 

 years of age, he supported himself by manual labor in the town of 

 Sandwich for a few years, after which he bought a farm in his home 

 county, and lived there for the eight years following. A native bent 

 for the observation of nature had inchned him to the collection and 

 study of insects, especially Coleoptera, in which he developed an 

 interest and enthusiasm which led him, in the fall of 1881, to seek for 

 an opportunity to devote his life to entomology. "There are but two 

 ways of becoming a naturalist," he wrote, "one, to cheat yourself out 

 of sleep and Sundays, which is the way I have been doing for ten years, . 

 and the other, getting scientific employment, as I wish to do now." 



He had already begun to publish brief papers on insects in the 

 Prairie Farmer, of Chicago (1879); in the Bulletin of the Brooklyn 

 Entomological Society (1879 and 1881); in the American Entomologist 

 (1880); and in the Bulletin of the Ilhnois State Laboratory of Natural 

 History (1880). The last of these articles, upon the Food of Preda- 

 ceous Beetles, especially showed the traits for which he afterwards be- 

 came well and widely known — in its evidence of close, acute, and 

 thoughtful observation and of wide and attentive reading, and in the 

 flavor of individuality which made his speech and writing interesting, 

 on whatever topic. 



It was by his engagement, in October, 1881, as an assistant in the 

 Ilhnois State Laboratory of Natural History, then located at Normal, 

 that the way he was seeking was opened to him when he was thirtj'- 

 two years of age; and he came there, with his wife and two children, 

 the following February, bringing with him his personal collection of 



