56 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW ^-February, , 9 ob 



tending its influence throughout our Illinois schools, that this paper is 

 written. 



The Bureau of Statistics shows that the value of the principal 

 agricultural crops in the United States during 1903 was $3,200,000- 

 000, while that of all manufactured articles was less than one billion 

 dollars. This indicates that over 75 per cent of our creative livelihood 

 still comes from the farm, from intimate contact with plants and with 

 the soil. Nowadays we hear much of an education for the life that 

 one is to live. Yet the cultivation of intelligence directly necessary 

 to maintain this tremendous industrial activity is dependent upon a 

 few agricultural colleges, expeiiment station bulletins, and institute 

 instructors, plus the precarious transmission of methods from father 

 to son. That this is far from adequate is shown on every hand. The 

 farmer boy doesn't like to spend the money necessary to take him 

 to college. The bulletins are ineffective because he doesn't under- 

 stand experimental methods and because he is often unfamiliar with 

 the objects considered, although they may be surrounding him daily. 

 The consequence is that thousands of men go on, daily and yearly 

 repeating mistakes that might easily be corrected if they only knew of 

 the available literature and could really read it. 



The failures and losses due to this destructive ignorance are enor- 

 mous. In our own state, according to Professor Forbes, "the insects 

 alone probably derive as large a profit from the agriculture as do the 

 farmers themselves. They cost us at least half as much as the whole 

 system of public schools, and a very large percentage of this great 

 loss might certainly be prevented, if we could bring the economic facts 

 of this one department into the store of common knowledge at the 

 command of every pupil in town and country school. That we fall 

 far short of this requirement is evident. The Hessian fly is not known 

 at sight in the adult stage or in the main features of its biography to 

 one in hundreds of those who suffer pitifully from its ravages." He 

 might have said the same thing about the codlin-moth, the army-worm, 

 the May-beetle. and several other ravenous insects. It is conservatively 

 estimated that a tenth of all our crops is lost to insects — a yearly loss 

 that would make millionaires of more than three hundred of us per 

 year — not to mention their influence in the conveyance of disease and 

 of unhappiness generally. 



On the other hand if we look into the lives of another group of our 

 animal contemporaries and recall the record of Professor Treadwell's 

 young robins, which daily required their own weight of insects to pre- 



