THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



Of late I have been thinking over the situation as it appeared 

 to me then. In other words, I have put myself in the place of the 

 assistants of those times, and I must confess that they exagger- 

 ated their own importance. There is much to be said for the 

 director. But undoubtedly, after I became a chief myself, I went 

 very far in the other direction. I had suffered so much from what 

 I considered to be bad treatment that I was very keen to give 

 everyone his just dues. In fact, John B. Smith, who had become 

 State Entomologist in New Jersey, wrote me once that I went 

 to an absurd extreme in that way. But I think I was right, and, 

 whether my example helped or not, there has been a great 

 reform. Of course nowadays a chief is not likely to hear com- 

 plaints of that kind, and in the last thirty or more years but one 

 complaint has ever reached my ears so far as my own personal 

 actions are concerned. That was rather an interesting case, and 

 I am inclined to tell about it. 



About 1898, especially after the Spanish- American War, I be- 

 came gready impressed by the extraordinary extent of food 

 pollution brought about mainly by the house fly, particularly in 

 cases where large numbers of people were concentrated for more 

 or less temporary purposes, and I began an investigation of the 

 insect fauna of human excreta. It was a very disagreeable subject, 

 but, as I thought, a very important one. I could not do all the 

 work myself, but I planned it, and sought the assistance of many 

 people in different parts of the United States. Most of them 

 helped me by collecting the insects that were attracted to ex- 

 posed food, but many of them collected the insects that were 

 attracted to excreta, either in the open or in privies, and still 

 others, specialists in the different groups, named the collected 

 material for me. Of course the help of all of these men was 

 thankfully acknowledged, and each one was mentioned per- 

 sonally. There was one young man, F. C. Pratt, an Englishman, 



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