46 Psyche [June-Sept. 
it was as a coleopterist that Mr. Fall made his scientific 
reputation. 
His sister has mentioned an important incident in con- 
nection with his turning seriously to Coleoptera. It was 
at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1878, when 
he was fifteen years old. He was already interested in 
natural history, and needed only some special stimulus to 
start him along one line or another of scientific work. The 
stimulus was provided by the capture of a fine Cerambycid 
beetle, Prionus pocularis, on July 17. The specimen is pre- 
served and labeled in the Fall Collection, of which it was 
the beginning. 
Since July 17, 1878, the Fall Collection has grown to well 
over one hundred thousand specimens in the main series of 
North American beetles, plus nearly one hundred thousand 
more in the Charles Liebeck Collection, which came to Mr. 
Fall a few years ago, plus thousands of exotic beetles, Lepi- 
doptera, and other insects. There are about a quarter of a 
million specimens in all. The collection contains between 
14,000 and 15,000 distinct, identified species of beetles from 
America north of Mexico. It is likely that this is nearly 
90% of the good, distinct species now known from the region, 
although nobody knows just how many species there really 
are. Mr. Fall described 1,484 of the species himself, prac- 
tically all unquestionably good. The types of most of them 
are in his own collection. He kept them in four Schmitt 
boxes, crowded together for quick rescue in case of fire. 
His main North American series fills 292 additional Schmitts. 
Besides his own types, there are many co- and paratypes of 
other workers, and innumerable specimens which Mr. Fall 
compared with the types of Leconte, Horn, and Casey. Such 
specimens are carefully labeled, and there is an accurate 
system of cross references from the labels to Mr. Fall’s 
notebooks, and to his working set of 59 bound volumes of 
papers on North American Coleoptera. The whole collec- 
tion is beautifully prepared and arranged. 
Mr. Fall has left his entire mounted insect collection, to- 
gether with his correspondence, notebooks, and numbered 
volumes of technical papers, to the Museum of Comparative 
Zoology at Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
The arranged North America beetles are to be kept as a 
