90 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
pursuit; and while still a young man Frederick Smith had 
become an ardent collector of bees and ants, and a close observer 
of their habits. 
In those early days his favourite collecting ground was 
Hampstead Heath, but by degrees he extended his researches to 
Lowestoft and Southend, to Deal and Weybridge, to the Isle of 
Wight, and many another sandy district in the South of England, 
until he acquired an unprecedented acquaintance with our 
indigenous species. Nor did he confine himself exclusively to 
Hymenoptera, for he made a collection of Coleoptera also; and 
in the days when John Walton flourished he paid especial attention 
to the Rhynchophora. On the death of Mr. Bainbridge in 1841, 
he was appointed to the office of Curator of the Collections and 
Library of the Entomological Society of London. This post he 
filled for nine years, or thereabouts ; and on every Monday during 
that period he was to be found at the Society's Rooms, in New 
Bond Street. 
As pupil first and afterwards as assistant to Mr. Cooke, 
Frederick Smith contributed to many of the works which were 
published by his master, including a considerable number of 
engravings of important pictures by Turner, Constable, and 
David Roberts. But having been engaged by Dr. Gray to 
arrange the British Museum Collection of Hymenoptera, he was 
employed upon this work at the time when a vacancy in the 
Zoological Department was created by the death of Edward 
Doubleday, in December, 1849. Shortly afterwards Frederick 
Smith was appointed one of the permanent entomological staff 
of the Museum ; and thenceforward he abandoned art for science, 
and relinquished engraving as a profession. But he engraved, 
from Westwood’s drawings, the plates of Wollaston’s ‘Insecta 
Maderensia’ (1854); and all those plates which illustrate the 
British Museum Catalogues of Hymenoptera, and his own 
papers in the Transactions of various learned societies, were 
drawn and engraved by himself. 
At a meeting of the Entomological Society held on the 3rd 
April, 1837, Mr. Ingpen read a letter from Mr. Smith, giving an 
account of the natural history of one of the Cynipide which 
inhabits the small flat galls on the under side of oak leaves (Proc. 
Ent. Soc., 1887, p. xl). This, I believe, is the first published 
notice of Frederick Smith’s observations. On the 2nd September, 
