442 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL EISBORY SOCIETY, Vol. XV 



country. Let us look at the other side, what we have against us. There 

 are extraordinary difficulties inherent in the nature of the country and 

 the people ; the great area to be worked over, the isolation of the cul- 

 tivators and the crops, the ignorance and complete lack not only of 

 knowledge but of desire to alter the natural state of things, these difficul- 

 ties are very great. The very forces that check the insects check also 

 any attempt to maintain an equable balance of life : the change of seasons, 

 the rotation of crops, the isolation of all districts not on a railway, will 

 make the matter very hard, simply from the difficulty of getting news 

 of an outbreak of disease in time to get to the spot and test remedies. 

 This sounds a small difficulty, but so much depends on starting remedies 

 before the pest has got a good hold that it becomes a very real one. It 

 will assuredly not be an easy matter to bring remedies within reach of 

 the cultivator, to whom every new thing is necessarily bad and to whom 

 every anna spent is a serious consideration. 



We may justly balance these considerations and realise what our diffi- 

 culties are at the outset ; .patient work will meet these difficulties just as 

 a careful study of the climatic and other helps will show us whether we 

 can turn them to advantage and check the increase of insect pests with- 

 out having recourse to artificial remedies. 



7. CONCLUSION. 



We are now in a position to review the subject in all its aspects and I 

 have tried to srmmarise what I have very inadequately dealt with above. 

 Our problem is to control the harmful and beneficial insects in this great 

 country, where agriculture is the source of prosperity and where ex- 

 traordinary conditions of climate, agriculture and people fight for and 

 against us. We are hampered from the beginning by the work of 

 merely identifying our insects ; we have then to work out life-histories 

 and habits, to learn the exact effect of climate, the importance and 

 influence of predaceous and parasitic insects ; also we have to gather and 

 tabulate information regarding the food plants and geographical distribu- 

 tion of our common insects. In all of these points we have a narrow 

 basis of ascertained fact to go on, particularly in regard to systematic 

 work and the question of food plants. 



As far as the wider problems are concerned, which lie at the base of 

 the whole question, we have as yet nothing but a small mass of isolated 

 facts. 



