256 ANIMALS OF LAND AND SEA 



investigating special problems, will form their diplomatic, ord- 

 nance and small arms departments. 



In their knowledge of their foes and how to meet them our 

 farmers are three hundred years behind our soldiers; and if we 

 compare the potential casualties represented by insect depre- 

 dations, by loss through parasites, or by imperfections in our 

 knowledge of plant and animal breeding and in similar ways with 

 the casualties in the armies of the world the differential is 

 still greater. We have only just begun the task of giving to 

 our farmers that organized assistance to w^hich they are entitled. 



How about our fishermen and those who live along the 

 coasts? In the not distant future when the cultivation of the 

 land has reached its limit and no further increase in our crops 

 is possible we shall have to cultivate the sea as well and from 

 it take the food to feed our surplus population. 



In the field of oceanography we have an enviable record, 

 equalled by no other nation; yet all that we have done is so 

 far in the nature of preliminary work; no detailed survey of the 

 economics of the ocean as a whole as yet has been attempted 

 anywhere. The study of the ocean is still far behind the 

 study of the land, and our sea resources are all but unappre- 

 ciated. It is in this field that research on a broad and gen- 

 erous scale is most urgently required in order to insure our 

 future. 



Just as the police serve to maintain order within our social 

 units, both by preventive and by coercive measures, so do the 

 doctors serve to keep our bodies healthy both through the pre- 

 vention of infection and by direct attack on all forms of dis- 

 ease. When we fall ill we think at once of doctors. We know 

 that medicine has conquered scurvy, tophus, malaria and 

 yellow fever, and made possible the Panama canal. But do 

 we realize that we are dealing here with applied biology and 

 that most of the knowledge embodied in modern medicine has 

 resulted from the work of relatively few research men who were 

 more biologists than doctors, of whom the public rarely hears, 

 yet whose work is fundamental? 



