1917] Howard—An Interesting Manuscript 87 
AN INTERESTING MANUSCRIPT. 
By L. O. Howarp. 
At a meeting of the Biological Society of Washington, held 
March 10, 1917, Dr. Hugh M. Smith, chief of the United States 
Bureau of Fisheries, exhibited a packet of 283 loose sheets, each 
sixteen and five-tenths centimeters by ten centimeters, backed by 
pasteboard covers and labeled in manuscript, “Olivier’s North 
American Coleoptera, 283 plates.” Below this legend is dimly 
written in pencil by a different hand, “‘ Painted by Mrs. C. L. H.—, 
wife of Professor C. L. Hentz, bgt. November 2, 185—.” Dr. 
Smith, after exhibiting the packet, presented it to the writer, 
calling attention to a newspaper clipping which he had found under 
the cover from the Boston Transcript of November 21, 1856, giving 
a notice of the death of Prof. N. M. Hentz at the residence of his 
son, Dr. Charles A. Hentz, at Mariana, Fla., on the fifth instant 
(7. e., November, 1856), followed by a brief obituary notice. Dr, 
Smith further stated that this packet had been bought by his 
father at a book sale very many years ago. 
On careful examination it seems obvious that this collection of 
loose leaves constitutes a selection of all the North American 
species of Coleoptera from the six volumes of A. G. Olivier’s 
“Entomologie, ou Histoire Naturelle des Insectes Coleopteres.”’ 
Obtaining access to a copy of Olivier’s great work, Prof. Nicholas 
Marcellus Hentz had evidently asked his talented wife, Caroline 
Lee Hentz, to copy the colored illustrations and descriptions of all 
of the species described from North America. Or possibly he did 
the drawing and she copied the descriptions. 
Hentz, before his marriage, had lived at Boston and Philadelphia, 
moving south shortly after marriage in 1824. Olivier’s work may 
have been loaned to him from Philadelphia or from Boston, as he 
was frequently in correspondence with T. W. Harris. 
In the correspondence, as published in “The Entomological 
Correspondence of Thaddeus William Harris, M. D.,” printed by 
the Boston Society of Natural History, in 1896, there is no refer- 
ence to the loan of Olivier, but the last letter published was Harris 
to Hentz, November 6, 1839, and the manuscript copy was prob- 
ably made later than that date. 
