712 HINTS FOR THE PROMOTION OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY. 
work which was done so well that of the many hundreds of 
species described by Say, and the smaller number by his collabo- 
rators, scarcely any remain doubtful, and but few unknown. 
Preéminent among the early naturalists of the United States, 
and far beyond any of them, both as an industrious collector, 
a careful observer in the field, and an intelligent investigator in 
the museum, was Dr. T. W. Harris, of Massachusetts. A man 
of singular modesty and diffidence, appreciated neither by him- 
self nor by others, but whose memory will be cherished by all 
who knew him, and whose merits will be more and more recog- ` 
nized as time brings him with his limited opportunities more 
strongly in contrast with the other students of his day. Had he 
published, as he wrote, the independent investigations on classifi- 
cation which he made, or had the proper facilities been afforded 
him and the requisite stimulus given, our science in this country 
would have anticipated many of the schemes of arrangement de- 
veloped later by the best European students. 
Among the entomologists of that time, properly pertaining to 
our country, must be named Dr. C. Zimmermann, a German by 
birth, and trained to science before he made this continent his 
home. The monographs of Zabrus and Amara, published before 
leaving Europe, still remain thoroughly careful and classical 
studies of those genera, to which nothing has been or can be 
added except the descriptions of species since collected. It was a 
misfortune for our science that Zimmermann too, though a pro- 
found and laborious student, would never publish the results of his 
investigations. As a systematist in the science, he was of the 
very highest order, and I here cheerfully acknowledge my obliga- 
tions to him for some of the hints which, afterwards more fully 
developed, have gained for several of my memoirs the generous 
approval of foreign entomologists. His manuscripts, submitted to 
me in 1867 by his widow, contained a large part of a systematic 
work on Coleoptera, with descriptions of many hundred new 
species of the Southern States, which, however, had beeh ren- 
dered of no avail by recent publications, posterior to the manu- 
scripts in question. 
After the founders of the science in this country came a period 
of apathy, during which nothing was done. The work of de- 
scription was then resumed by Melsheimer, Ziegler and myself, 
. rae however, any attempt at independent study of classifica- 
