April. I0I3 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 53 



edited by Leconte. Poverty, always comparative, sometimes 

 extreme, was his lot. For some years he was accustomed to sleep on 

 a bench in the collection hall of the Philadelphia Academy of 

 Sciences, which body had begun to have importance from about 

 1812. Say's expenses for food at that time averaged about six 

 cents a day. His entomological articles were notable from 1817. 

 A year later he joined an expedition for Florida, collecting 

 much in Georgia, but failing to attain the sought for prize. The 

 Indians made life unsafe in Florida, and the state remained terra 

 incognita for twenty years longer. Soon afterwards he penetrated 

 the far West to Colorado, about fifteen hundred miles into the 

 unknown wilderness. The common, almost cosmopolitan, potato 

 beetle of to-day, was discovered by him in Colorado, feeding upon 

 a solanaceous weed. On his return, he accepted a position to 

 manage a land company in the southwest comer of Indiana. Here 

 he lived in disappointment and ill health for nine years, always 

 collecting, publishing and corresponding. It may seem strange 

 that such a man should have only 734 species of beetle to his 

 credit in the check list, but it must be remembered that he studied 

 all orders of insects, mollusks and even considered with Audubon 

 great works on mammals and birds. His work, also, was very 

 carefully done. His types, alas, do not exist. His descriptions 

 have never been excelled in clearness. He had a marvelous 

 faculty for expressing the salient characters of an insect in the 

 fewest possible words. At the time of his death the numbers of 

 described American beetles scarcely exceeded 1,500. Three- 

 fourths of the territory of the United States was then uninhabited 

 by civilized peoples, and of the area of Canada not one-twentieth 

 was anything but unbroken wilderness. 



In spite of his poverty Say was too enthusiastic a collector 

 to part with insects for money, although foreign collectors were 

 willing to pay well for new things. The one exception on record 

 was the type of Amblychila cylindriformis . It was an unique, 

 a male. When the news reached London that Say had caught 

 a Cicindelid an inch and a half long, of a new genus, an enthusiast 

 bid $300 gold for the specimen, and Say accepted it. Both sides 

 were quite satisfied, for as luck would have it, a second specimen 

 was not captured until about twenty years later. 



