ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY. 219 



earnestness as grammar or language. These, surely, cannot excel 

 it as a means whereby to train the youthful intellect to habits of 

 close, careful, and accurate reasoning, order, and patient attention. 

 The study, properly directed, of God's creatures can hardly be of 

 less value as a mental and moral training than that of a dead 

 language, and must necessarily bear much more nearly on our 

 daily life. 



The insect kingdom — by far the most numerous in species of 

 any corresponding group throughout animal life — is, as you are 

 aware, classified into some twelve or thirteen principal families. 

 Each of these families sends its quota to the host of the insect 

 marauders of our gardens and fields. Happily for us, each group 

 also contains not only species, but entire families, whose object in 

 life is to prey upon these pests, to hunt them down, to devour 

 them in each stage of their life. Thus has Nature put a check 

 upon their increase, without which the human race would quickly 

 have been eaten out of the land. Without these natural allies, 

 we should have been powerless to overcome these deadly if 

 minute enemies — the more deadly, indeed, because of their minute 

 size, which renders it so difficult for us to discover them till the 

 mischief they cause is well-nigh irremediable. 



It is, then, evidently of the first importance that we should 

 acquire that knowledge which shall enable us to recognise our 

 friends so as not to confound them in the wholesale destruction 

 we attempt to bring about of our pests. As a first step towards 

 this knowledge, it is to be observed that the Insecta — Uke the 

 higher animal kingdoms — comprises groups of vegetable-feeders 

 and of flesh-feeders. Now, it is amongst the former that are 

 found those insects that cause the most serious losses to our 

 various crops ; while it is to the latter — to the predaceous and 

 carnivorous class — that we are indebted for the keeping within 

 bounds, the enormous increase of the devourers of our fruit and 

 food that would otherwise take place by reason of the wonderful 

 powers possessed by them of reproduction. It is thus, as in so 

 many instances throughout life, that Nature provides, as it were, a 

 natural balance of forces, and I would ask. What can we do more 

 wisely than avail ourselves of Nature's own means of keeping 

 in check the myriads of foes that would, if left to themselves, 



