THE ENTOMOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF ALPHEUS 
SPRING PACKARD. 
By SAMUEL HENSHAW. 
Alpheus Spring Packard was born in Brunswick, Me., February 19, 
1839. His father was Alpheus Spring Packard, D. D., for over sixty 
years a professor in Bowdoin College. His mother was Frances EH. 
Appleton, daughter of Rev. Jesse Appleton; president of Bowdoin 
College. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1861, he spent 
three years at the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoology as a 
student of Prof. L. Agassiz: Fora part of one year (1863-64) he was 
the private assistant of Professor Agassiz. 
Two summers (those of 1860 and 1864) were passed upon the coast of 
Labrador, where collections of marine invertebrates, insects, and quat- 
ernary fossils were accumulated for future investigations. In 186162 
he was assistant to the Maine Geological Survey. In 1864 he took the 
degree of Doctor of Medicine at the Maine Medical School. In Sep- 
tember of the same year Dr. Packard was commissioned assistant 
surgeon First Maine Veteran Volunteer Infantry, and served in the 
Sixth Corps until mustered out with the regiment in July, 1865. In 
1865-66 he was acting custodian and librarian of the Boston Society 
of Natural History. Dr. Packard spent eleven years (1867—’78) in 
Salem. Appointed in 1867 one of the curators of the Peabody Acad- 
emy, he was for about two years (1877-78) the director of its museum. 
At Salem he established a summer school of biology, and in March, 
.1868, the first number of the American Naturalist was issued. Dr. 
Packard was one of the originators of this magazine, and for twenty 
years its editor-in-chief. 
In 1867 he married Elizabeth Derby, daughter of Samuel B. Walcott 
of Salem, and has had four children, of whom a son and two daughters 
are living. As lecturer or instructor Dr. Packard has been connected 
with the Anderson School of Natural History, Bowdoin College, and 
the Maine and Massachusetts State Agricultural Colleges; as assistant 
he has been attached to the Kentucky Geological Survey, to Hayden’s 
United States Geological Survey of the Territories, and to the United 
States Fish Commission. When in search of material for his studies 
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