30 
Psyche 
[March 
many of the members elected were graduate students living in the 
vicinity of Cambridge, there has been a noticeable increase in the 
number of amateurs that have joined the Club and that have regu- 
larly attended the meetings. From 1903, when the Harris Club 
members were elected, through the Bussey meetings in the twenties, 
non-professionals made up about half of the membership in attend- 
ance. This may have been due in part to W. M. Wheeler’s en- 
couragement of amateur naturalists and his open expression of high 
regard for their contributions both to research and to the training of 
biologists.* However, during the thirties and forties, perhaps as a 
consequence of the depression and of World War II, the number of 
non-professional members in the Club dropped significantly. In the 
course of the past two decades, this trend has been reversed. 
Other trends in the nature of the membership during the past two 
decades are apparent. For example, more women have joined the 
Club and taken part in the programs than previously. In the late 
fifties the Club experienced the greatest infusion of feminine talent 
in the entire history of its administration, with the election of Ruth 
Lippet Willey as secretary (1955) and Margaret C. Parson as secre- 
tary (1957), vice-president (1958) and, in 1950, as the first lady 
president of the Entomological Club. 
Another striking change has been the increase in the number of 
arachnologists in the Club. The study of spiders was well repre- 
sented in the Club 'from the very beginning by J. H. Emerton, one 
of the founders; as shown by the minutes of the meetings, he often 
spoke on habits of spiders — flying spiders were his favorite topic — 
and he published many papers in Psyche. After his death in 1932, 
spiders were almost never mentioned at the meetings until 1956, when 
Dr. Herbert Levi was appointed at the Museum of Comparative 
Zoology and became a member of the Club. He was promptly joined 
by a series of enthusiastic students of spiders (and even of milli- 
pedes). Such was their productivity that in 1964 Dr. Carpenter, 
while exhibiting the December issue of Psyche , felt compelled to note 
“what he interpreted as a hopeful trend in the fact that the number 
*In his address, “The Dry-Rot of Our Academic Biology,” at the Boston 
meeting of the American Society of Naturalists in 1922 Wheeler advocated 
the “utilization by the instructor of competent amateur naturalists as oc- 
casional assistants” and he continued: “We have all known amateurs who 
could make an enthusiastic naturalist out of an indifferent lad in the course 
of an afternoon’s ramble, and, alas, professors who could destroy a dozen 
budding naturalists in the course of an hour’s lecture.” [33]. 
