THE IMPORTANCE OF BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH 255 



fection, while the hordes which he is called upon to meet are 

 merely "bugs" to him. 



Each "bug," however, is as distinctive in its way as is the 

 human race itself and must be thoroughly understood in order 

 to be vanquished. And hordes of alien "bugs" exist in other 

 countries of which the brown-tailed moths, the gypsy-moths, 

 the cabbage butterflies and boll-worms are but samples waiting 

 to cross the sea to us. 



Our farmers have no time to spend on the details of en- 

 tomology, or in the study of the parasites that infest their 

 animals and fowl, any more than our soldiers have time to 

 perfect themselves in the mathematics of range-finding, or in 

 the details of the chemistry of the explosives used in war. The 

 soldier knows that if he sets his sights for 600 yards, takes aim 

 and pulls the trigger, the ball will carry true and he will get 

 his man. His confidence in the mathematicians who designed 

 his sights and in the chemists who prepared his powder is so 

 impUcit that he never gives a thought to them, but takes 

 their work for granted and is quite justified in doing so. 



How about the farmers and their war against the "bugs?" 

 Most farmers stand where armies stood three hundred years 

 ago, when powder was a treacherous thing, too unreliable for 

 mathematics, and armies had to face largely with swords and 

 pikes wild and savage tribes with unknown implements of war- 

 fare. 



Chemistry and mathematics and that form of social under- 

 standing called diplomacy have made the modern armies what 

 they are. Chemistry and mathematics and a similar under- 

 standing of the Hfe history, habits and proclivities of his ene- 

 mies, insects and parasites, will do the same for farmers. Just 

 as the modern army owes its effectiveness to the labors in the 

 past of a relatively small minority of men, largely unconnected 

 with a military Hfe, so the farmers in the future more and more 

 will be dependent on the labors of the research students who, 

 by concentrating on some special line in entomology, parasitol- 

 ogy, chemistry or other science and spending all their lives 



