24 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



by ericabling him to meet successfully the pests and scourges 

 let loose by the animal or vegetable world upon his crops. 



The husbandman has indeed many races to run with the 

 hosts of nature in harvesting his season's work. A myriad 

 of unbidden guests are hungry for it ; green or dry, in the 

 bud or fruit, it never comes amiss to their ravenous jaws. 

 Insect armies migrate across a continent, leaving a desert as 

 they go. The air is dusty with disease to the growing grain, 

 as sometimes with pestilence to men. Ever since the day 

 when sacred prophecy interpreted the locust swarms as the 

 wrath of God, agriculture has had to fight for its own. And 

 it is here that the eager curiosity which loves to explore the 

 forms and laws of every life, though that life may only be a 

 microscopic point, or a noxious and loathsome thing, does 

 good service to the cultivator of the ground. It teaches him 

 to crush the evil in the cradle or the egg. It puts it in his 

 power to pit one enemy against another, fighting fire with 

 fire. It hangs upon some slender thread of habits in the 

 movements of a depredator — the foil to his attack. Some of 

 the classics of science, like the well-known volume of Dr. 

 Harris here in Massachusetts, have been written in the inter- 

 ests of agricultural success. 



Endowments from a State or nation to promote such studies 

 — the work of individual investigators or agricultural depart- 

 ments — are all liable to a double misapprehension. Upon 

 one side it seems so absurd to pension entomology ! a science 

 which may be fascinating to a few harmless zealots, with net 

 in hand to capture, and Latin and Greek lexicons within 

 reach to name, their victims ; but which, even more than any 

 other pursuit, impairs the popular respect for a person's 

 sanity. It is so easy to ridicule such things, and wail for 

 money wasted on this sand. It is not here alone that men 

 are blind to the enlargements of their own interests. Within 

 the last dozen years, a prominent member of our American 

 Congress, mentioned more than once for the highest oflice 

 in the people's gift, labored in his place to oppose our 

 national coast survey, because he was a Western represent- 

 ative, and Illinois and Minnesota were out of hearing of 

 Atlantic waves. As if the great West had any other high- 

 way for the exportation of her products than the sea, whose 



