180 Psyche [December 



widely read of all his writings. Some of them were reprinted, a 

 few years ago, in the little volume entitled "Frail Children of the 

 Air." One, which did not find a place in the smaller collection, 

 but which is regarded as a classic by students of zoogeography, 

 is called "The Spread of a Butterfly in a New Region." It gives 

 a detailed history of the invasion of North America by Pieris 

 rapae. 



"The Life of a Butterfly," a little monograph oiAnosia plexippus, 

 was published in 1893. The influence of this book is seen in the 

 almost unanimous adoption of plexippus as the "typical butterfly" 

 by teachers of elementary zoology in American schools. 



Though mainly interested in the careful working out of life- 

 histories, and their application to the solution of ontogenetic and 

 phylogenetic problems, Doctor Scudder was the author of the 

 first descriptions of some thirty species of American butterflies. 

 His studies in classification were far-reaching. It is perhaps 

 because these studies led him, in some instances, a long way from 

 the beaten track of earlier monographers, that his popular manuals 

 have not been so generally used as their author hoped they might 

 be. But among men of learning his conclusions gained wide 

 acceptance and support; and as time goes on, and students of 

 heredity and evolution learn to make use of the wealth of material 

 which the butterflies afford for their investigations, new cause will 

 appear for grateful remembrance of his thorough and critical survey 

 of the ground. 



In all his published works, but more especially in those dealing 

 with the Lepidoptera, Doctor Scudder showed the qualities of 

 the real naturalist. Like Darwin, going again and again to watch 

 the Bryony buffeted by the gale, he was ever revisiting the haunts 

 of particular butterflies, and amending or confirming, by patient 

 observation, his accumulated data. So the breath of outdoors is 

 in his writings, and the eagerness of the explorer was in his spoken 

 words; and the sight of the autumnal flocks of the Monarch, or 

 the feeble flight of Oeneis about leeward ledges, must always recall 

 to us their greatly gifted interpreter. 



