106 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. VIII 



The Work and Times of Dr. Harris 



By R. P. Dow, Brooklyn, N. Y. 



Two allusions have already been made in the historical 

 papers of the Bulletin to Dr. Thaddeus W. Harris, one regard- 

 ing his attempt to restore the vermin-eaten collection of Say, 

 the other beginning a life-long correspondence with Rev. Wil- 

 liam Kirby. Any adequate notice of this pioneer should be a 

 history of American entomology for 35 years. During half 

 that period there were not five men in this country worthy of 

 the name entomologist. 



Eight years younger than Thomas Say, Harris had a career 

 comparable in many respects with that of Kirby. After a 

 University education, becoming the typical country collec- 

 tor in all orders, he developed into the first American 

 Entomologist of his time and the central figure of the Boston 

 Society of Natural History, as was Kirby of the Entomological 

 Society of London. 



Coming of a scholarly family in Cambridge, Harris went 

 through Harvard and attended the slender course of lectures 

 in Natural History by Prof. Wm. D, Peck, but apparently did 

 not take up entomological pursuits, until influenced by Peck 

 after his graduation. The earliest specimens in his collection 

 date from his residence in Milton, Mass., where he began the 

 practice of medicine, in 1821 and where he practiced in all for 

 eleven years. 



For the public data of Harris' life there is a memoir by his 

 son, a briefer one by his pupil. Major Thomas Wentworth 

 Higginson, and a volume of his correspondence, edited by 

 Samuel H. Scudder. In the last the most interesting are the 

 letters exchanged with Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a French- 

 man by birth, who came to this country in boyhood and was 

 teaching at the time in Northampton. Harris was not fond of 

 medicine and never attained to a lucrative practice. He 

 began to be an entomologist. Almost bookless, companionless, 

 he and Hentz worried together over the identification of their 

 commonest things. Even this was not to last. In 1826 Hentz 

 was called to a chair in the University of North Carolina. 

 Harris hoped to follow him there, and even suggested that he 

 might read up to fill a chair of Materia Medica or Gynecology. 

 Fate ruled otherwise, or Harris might have passed his whole 



