THE COMSTOCK MEMORIAL 
17 
future students, while being both appropriate and permanent. 
Furthermore, we refrained from solicitation of funds. No one was 
asked to contribute anything. The pupils of Professor Comstock 
have voluntarily contributed $2,500.00 mostly in small sums. It has 
been given gladly, even joyously. One of the delights of the local 
committee have been the reading in the letters of those who have 
contributed their testimonials of affectionate regard and enthusiastic 
loyalty. 
Professor Comstock came to the University in a day when good 
books in entomology were more scarce than now. Much of the labor 
of his life among us has been spent in providing better books for 
students use. His own books make a good basis for a library in 
entomology. There are none of mushroom growth among them. 
Never were books more carefully prepared, or more carefully tried 
out in manuscript at the hands of students before publication. They 
are all of permanent value. 
We have selected one of them to be the first volume of this memo¬ 
rial collection of books in entomology — his Evolution and Taxonomy, 
published in 1893 as a part of the Wilder Quarter-Century Festschrift. 
It seems to us best to typify his work at Cornell. It was the result 
of the labor of many years. Its stimulus lay in the needs of his 
classes for a better formulation of some of the fundamental principles 
of entomological science. It let in a flood of new light upon an old 
and much vexed subject. 
(The speaker here read quotations from this work, showing its 
origin and its long progress, and then other quotations from prominent 
European investigators, showing the esteem in which this work is held 
abroad, and then continued.) 
* As I turn over the pages of this book to-day I see in them, not the 
thorough-going method they fostered in the study of homologies in 
general, nor the significance they pointed out in the venation of the 
wings of insects in particular; but I see those qualities here that 
characterized all his work and that made his teaching so effective: 
1. Clearness —such clearness as never left anyone in doubt as to 
his meaning. 
2. Hones ty — simple honesty that went straight to the point, and 
reverenced the truth. How well all of us who studied in his labora¬ 
tory remember his injunction “Be sure you are right, and then look 
again.” 
