31 



Some time last summer another specimen of your skill was seut to me from tlie hor- 

 ticultural ball, in Boston, but at that time I was very much engaged in preparing 

 copj^ for the printer, and carrying through the press a new edition of my "Treatise 

 on Insects Injurious to Vegetation." My tables were covered with manuscript proof- 

 sheets, specimens, and various miscellaneous matters, among which your engrav- 

 ing was lain, and it has disappeared in one of the clearings up of my clutter. It 

 is not lost, only mislaid, and will come to light again without doubt when I can 

 muster resolution and hud time to overhaul my papers. I name these facts to ac- 

 count for my apparent neglect to acknowledge your favor. My book at last is tin- 

 ished and bound ; and now, if you will tell me how I can send a copy to you, it 

 will give me much pleasure to forward it to your address. My scientific friends tell 

 me that all the book wants is a set of figures to illustrate the descriptions. I am 

 fully sensible that its value would be much increased by such illustration, and that* 

 it would then supply fully a want that has long been felt for a work combining sci- 

 entitic descriptions of our most common destructive insects with good colored fio-ures 

 of the same. 



I am very much pleased with your success in engraving on stone. With practice 

 you will doubtless acquire the skill to represent insects in the very best style of this 

 kind of engraving. This kind of work is much to bo preferred to engraving on cop- 

 per, because of its general cheapness ; the stone admitting of being ground down and 

 nsed again ; and a delicate and skillful engraver can represent insects about as well 

 on stone as on copper. I think you will find it quite as easy to execute engravinos 

 on stone as on copper, and I hope you may be induced to perfect yourself in this art. 

 Your specimens certainly do you great credit, and I am very glad that you have so 

 promptly and successfully acted upon my suggestion. * * * 



When you write me to inform me how to send you my book please to let me know 

 what you consider would be a fair price for the engraving of a plate with insects on 

 it of the size of your specimen plates. The cost of striking off, which must be done 

 by the press, would be another matter, and may be known by inquiry. It would de- 

 pend in some measure, also, on the number of impressions wanted. I very much wish 

 some arrangement could be made with you for preparing a series of plates to illustrate 

 my book. To do this, however, it would be necessai-y for you to take up your residence 

 here. The plates might be issued iu numbers, accompanied by brief descriptions 

 referring to pages of the treatise. I have also another plan in view, which has 

 long been a favorite one with me, namely : To prepare a series of small popular vol- 

 umes on our insects, with plates, somewhat like Jardine's Naturalist's Library, to be 

 entitled Insect Biography. The first volume to contain a brief, general introduction 

 somewhat like the introductory chapter of my treatise, with figures illustrating the 

 orders of insects. The second to treat of jirincipal families, illustrating them with 

 the biography of one or two common insects of each family. The third to take up 

 some large group and describe and figure the most prominent species in it, and so on 

 with the other volumes as the public taste and demand for the work might guide or 

 encourage it. A work of this kind would do more to promote a general taste for en- 

 tomology than anything else, and I think it would meet with very good encourage- 

 ment. Hitherto I have been deterred from undertaking it for the want of co-opera- 

 tion of a competent artist to execute the plates; our engravers having no skill in 

 such matters and no taste to make themselves acquainted with the details of insect 

 structure, aud, moreover, being extravagantly high in their charges. Sonrel, a Swiss 

 engraver, is the only person who can do such work at all well, and he being a for- 

 eigner and not speaking English well, it will be difficult to get along with htm. 

 Please let me know your thoughts on these plans of mine. 

 Truly yours, 



Thaddeus William Harris. 

 Mr. T. Glover. 



