Leland Howard was born in Illinois on June 11, 1857, but moved with his parents to New York state when he was young, and it was in the vicinity of the town of Ithaca that he grew up. His interests in natural history were encouraged by his parents. However, when he entered Cornell University, it was to study civil engineering at the insistence of his mother, who by then was a widow. Leland transferred to the natural sciences without telling his mother, studied botany, geology, and chemistry, and worked in the laboratory of Henry Comstock. He graduated in 1877, and the following summer was contacted by Charles Riley to persuade him to go to Washington, DC, and work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The offer was accepted, and Howard moved there and worked on numerous projects in applied entomology, including brown-tail moth, gypsy moth, European corn borer, Japanese beetle, and scale insects, and taxonomy of Hymenoptera including Ichneumonidae, Braconidae, Chalcididae, and...