L. O. Howard.
An Interesting Manuscript.
Psyche 24(3):87-88, 1917.

This article at Hindawi Publishing: https://doi.org/10.1155/1917/18056
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19171 Howard-An Interesting Manuscript
AN INTERESTING MANUSCRIPT.
BY L, 0. HOWARD.
At a meeting of the Biological Society of Washington, held March 10, 1917, Dr. Hugh M. Smith, chief of the United States Bureau of Fisheries, exhibited a packet of 283 loose sheets, each sixteen and five-tenths centimeters by ten centimeters, backed by pasteboard covers and labeled in manuscript, "Olivier's North American Coleoptera, 283 plates." Below this legend is dimly written in pencil by a different hand, "Painted by Mrs. C. L. H.-, wife of Professor C. L. Hentz, bgt. November 2, 185-." Dr. Smith, after exhibiting the packet, presented it to the writer, calling attention to a newspaper clipping which he had found under the cover from the Boston Transcript of November 21, 1856, giving a notice of the death of Prof. N. M. Hentz at the residence of his son, Dr. Charles A. Hentz, at Mariana, Fla., on the fifth instant (i. e., November, 1856), followed by a brief obituary notice. Dr. Smith further stated that this packet had been bought. by his father at a book sale very many years ago. On careful examination it seems obvious that this collection of loose leaves constitutes a selection of all the North American species of Coleoptera from the six volumes of A. G. Olivier's c6Entomologie, ou Histoire Naturelle des Insectes Coleopteres." . Obtaining access to a copy of Olivier's great work, Prof. Nicholas Marcellus Hentz had evidently asked his talented wife, Caroline Lee Hentz, to copy the colored illustrations and descriptions of all of the species described from North America. Or possibly he did the drawing and she copied the descriptions. Hentz, before his marriage, had lived at Boston and Philadelphia, moving south shortly after marriage in 1824. Olivier's work may have been loaned to him from Philadelphia or from Boston, as he was frequently in correspondence with T. W. Harris. In the correspondence, as published in "The Entomological Correspondence of Thaddeus William Harris, M. D.," printed by the Boston Society of Natural History, in 1896, there is no refer- ence to the loan of Olivier, but the last letter published was Harris to Hentz, November 6, 1839, and the manuscript copy was prob- ably made later than that date.




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