ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



PHILADELPHIA, PA., FEBRUARY, 1914. 



The Influence of Insects on Civilization. 



The discoveries of recent years of the parts played by in- 

 sects in the transmission of diseases have demonstrated, as 

 never before, how civilization may be retarded by creatures 

 formerly so commonly despised as unworthy of serious atten- 

 tion. The Panama Canal, the health of Italy, of India, of 

 Havana, of Rio de Janeiro, of New Orleans, are now familiar 

 examples of the influence of the hexapods on human prosper- 

 ity. Sir Ronald Ross has gone so far as to suggest that the 

 downfall of Greece was largely due to malaria, and malaria 

 means the Anopheles mosquito, a conqueror greater than 

 Alexander. No less striking is the effect produced by insects 

 which in large numbers, through a series of years, devastate 

 a staple agricultural product. 



Dr. W. E. Hinds, of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment 

 Station, in a paper on "County Organization in the Boll Weevil 

 Campaign," read at the recent Atlanta meeting of the Amer- 

 ican Association of Economic Entomologists, considered that 

 the spread of the boll weevil eastward through the Southern 

 States has been more of an advantage than a loss to the human 

 population, inasmuch as it has operated to diminish the dele- 

 terious practice of planting cotton year after year on the same 

 ground, to encourage the habit of rotation of crops and to 

 bring about the necessity for greater co-operation between the 

 planters and other members of the community, a co-operation 

 which has not stopped with measures to combat the weevil but 

 has subsequently extended to those for bettering the com- 

 munity in other ways. 



We find no entomological entries in the indexes to Buckle, 

 but the future historian of civilization cannot neglect the influ- 

 ence of insects on the processes he attempts to describe. 



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