Jacob Hübner published his great volumes on exotic butterflies in the early part of the nineteenth century. This work was written in German, and contained more than six hundred colored plates, but a good copy now costs about eight hundred dollars, and is of very little use anyway. In 1797 Sir James Edward Smith brought out his two-volume work on _The Natural History of the Rarer Lepiodopterous Insects of Georgia_, the first books ever devoted exclusively to North American species. This work is valuable chiefly because it contains some drawings by John Abbot, an Englishman who had actually lived in Georgia and studied moths and butterflies at first hand. Some of Abbot’s pictures were later used in another work on American lepidoptera by Dr. J. A. Boisduval of Paris, and Major J. L. LeConte of New York, who wrote in French about 1833. The books of both Smith and Boisduval are now practically unobtainable. In 1841 the Biological Survey Commission of Massachusetts published a report on injurious insects by Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, which described many New England butterflies. It is now out of print, the last edition appearing in 1862. The Rev. John G. Harris brought together a deal of information from the works of other writers, and made a few minor observations of his own; his compilation was published by the Smithsonian Institution about 1860. In 1868 William H. Edwards, an engineer who lived in Coalburg, West Virginia, brought out the first volume of his famous work, _The Butterflies of North America_--probably the best book on the subject ever written. Edwards laboriously worked out the life-histories of many species, and illustrated the work by careful drawings and paintings of his own. Two more volumes appeared later, the last one published in 1897. _The Butterflies of North America_ is a magnificent piece of work, produced under all sorts of handicaps, and will always be a classic to American students of the subject. In 1886 Dr. Samuel Hubbard Scudder published his _Butterflies of New England_ in three volumes; this monograph is superbly illustrated, and compares very favorably even with the epoch-making work of Edwards. The works of Edwards and Scudder are probably the best books on butterflies ever written in any language, and must always remain as monuments of American industry and scholarship. Because of the excessive cost of reproducing the colored plates, however, they are both rather expensive; Scudder’s work retailed at ninety dollars, while Edward’s three volumes never sold for less than a hundred and fifty, and even this price, according to Dr. W. J. Holland, was below the cost of manufacture. _The Butterflies of the Eastern United States_, by G. H. French, appeared about 1886. It is a good little book, and is still in common use, but the illustrations are few and unsatisfactory.