PSYCHE 
Vol. 70 
March, 1963 
No. 1 
CHARLES ALBERT FROST 
A Biographic Sketch and List of Publications 
Charles Albert Frost was born in Monmouth, Maine, on August 
28, 1872. He attended local schools and the University of Maine, 
where he graduated in 1895 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineer- 
ing. He spent his working years as a civil engineer with the Water- 
works Division of the Metropolitan District Commission, with 
responsibilities in and around Framingham, Massachusetts. He lived 
in Framingham for the last fifty years of his life, at 67 Henry Street. 
Here he built up a very important private collection of North Ameri- 
can beetles. Its importance lay less in what he published than in the 
part it enabled him to play: in his wide knowledge, the extensive cor- 
respondence that he continued almost to the day of his death, and his 
very great helpfulness to other coleopterists. He was almost the last 
of the old-time, general students of Coleoptera, who knew the entire 
order, and who were members of a network of collectors and students 
interested in beetles who covered the whole of the United States and 
southern Canada. He was one of my first entomological friends 
(much older than I, of course), and a fine, intelligent, generous, use- 
ful man. He died at home on March 11, 1962, at the age of 89. 
Mr. Frost has left his collection of beetles to the Museum of Com- 
parative Zoology, Harvard University. It fills 116 Schmitt or similar 
boxes. There are at least 50,000 specimens and perhaps many more; 
some of the boxes are so crowded that it is difficult to count the speci- 
mens in them. The specimens are well mounted, well labeled, and 
clean, and a large proportion of them have been studied and identified 
either by Mr. Frost himself or by competent specialists with whom he 
corresponded. There are some holotypes, and many paratypes of other 
workers. The collection is especially strong in small beetles, which are 
hard to collect and mount, and which are very much needed to fill out 
the study series of North American Coleoptera at the museum. The 
specimens will be individually labeled “C.A. Frost Collection” and 
incorporated in the museum’s main series of North American beetles. 
P. J. Darlington, Jr. 
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