By Way of an Introduction. 13 



man. The balance of life must make wide oscillations 

 before it finds again an equilibrium. 



Forests have been cut away as never before, and the 

 bared fields have been sown with crops of plants that 

 have behind them, not the inherited strength of millions 

 of years of adherence to one form, but the weakness of a 

 thing of yesterday. What cultivated fruit or flower is 

 to-day what it was a half century ago? The goose- 

 berries in my grandmother's garden were of the size of 

 peas and had stickers on them. The size of peas? \Yhat 

 peas? You must know that ere you have a measure of 

 comparison. Yet peas were once about of a bigness. 



Driven from the forests that no longer exist, hordes 

 upon hordes of insects turn to our gardens and our fields 

 for sustenance. They swarm over everything and devour 

 our food before our eyes. They find us almost as unable 

 to combat them as the Huns found mediaeval Europe. 

 We have so abolished poisonous snakes that I do not 

 believe I ever saw one out of captivity. Wolves and bears 

 and catamounts \ve behold only pacing behind bars in the 

 parks. Every boy whose father gives him a shot-gun 

 bangs away at wild birds till there is none left to speak 

 of, and how many thousand destructive insects a bird may 

 destroy in a day our governmental entomologists are just 

 now trying to find out. Millions upon millions of dol- 

 lars would hardly pay for all the damage done to one 

 food-crop in the year by six-legged depredators, and 

 almost the only thing we do is to put up with it. 



Xew kinds of insects preying upon food-stuffs are im- 

 ported every year from foreign lands in commerce, which 

 is now \vorld-wide. New kinds of insects -find our fruits 

 and vegetables as appetizing and as nourishing as the 

 forest growths so swiftly disappearing. Not only are we 

 cursed in our fields, but in our basket and store. It is 



