December, 1913 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 109 



with others in the Boston Society of Natural History. Little 

 of it was left by 1861. Insects are fragile; constant care of 

 them a necessity. There were few who looked at them for 

 twenty years. Moreover the scientists of the old days pinned 

 their faith on printed descriptions. It did not occur to 

 Harris and his confreres that subdivision would be carried to 

 a point where a TYPE was everything and a description of 

 secondary importance at best. It took Leconte, Schwarz and 

 Henshaw to teach the value of a type. Eschscholtz and Manner- 

 heim gave types away without hesitation when they had 

 compared other specimens with them. 



The plan which Dr. Harris made as early as 1825 to publish a 

 list of local insects — a Faunula Insectorum Bostoniensis — was 

 never carried out, largely through difficulty in establishing 

 names of the Diptera, Hymenoptera and some of the lower 

 orders. Literature was hard to acquire and money to acquire 

 it harder to get. The European writings came one by one, not 

 from library funds but out of Harris' savings. Literature on 

 many orders was not in existence. Of every work that came 

 into Harris' possession he made a careful index of species, all 

 through long tomes of Olivier, Fabricius, Schoenherr, and 

 many others. As a substitute for his original plan he prepared 

 a list of the insects found in Massachusetts, and this was ap- 

 pended to Hitchcock's Geological Report. Dr Harris received 

 no remuneration whatever for this work. Ten years later he 

 was appointed by the State as one of a commission to make a 

 more thorough survey. In this capacity he prepared his 

 "Report on Insects Injurious to Vegetation." The State paid 

 him $175 for this work. The following year it was re-pub- 

 lished by himself as a treatise, with a second revised edition 

 ten years later. The edition generally seen nowadays was 

 published by the State ten years later still, after his death, 

 and the colored plates therein were never seen by him. 



A most valuable friend was a classmate, Rev. L. W. Leonard, 

 who settled in Dublin, N. H., an enthusiastic collector and 

 breeder of all orders of insects. This gentleman, whose name 

 is preserved in the checklist by Melanotus leonardi Lee, sent 

 on one occasion to Harris 600 specimens of beetles, probably 

 over 200 species, caught in the shadow of Mt. Monadnock. 

 Leonard made no effort to describe species, presumably on 



