THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



As it happened, in tlie decade following 1889, four remarkable 

 things occurred. The first was the discovery of the Gipsy Moth 

 in New England in 1889; the second was the finding of the 

 Mexican Cotton Boll Weevil in Texas in 1893; the third was 

 the appearance of the San Jose Scale in eastern orchards about 

 the same time; and the fourth was the discovery by Ronald Ross 

 of the carriage of malaria by certain mosquitoes. The first three 

 were of tremendous importance to the United States, and in- 

 volved the loss of many millions of dollars. The fourth was of 

 the greatest importance to all mankind, for malaria, while not 

 so great in mortality as cholera and the plague and certain other 

 diseases, was responsible for a tremendous lowering of vitality 

 and for the bringing about of conditions leading up to mortality 

 from other causes. 



Thus the horizon opened up very greatly. I felt that I was 

 no longer engaged in work that might be called of comparatively 

 litde importance. One of the four discoveries mentioned above 

 leads naturally to a digression and takes us back to an earlier 

 period. 



In the early i88o's, being by no means convinced of the cer- 

 tainty of a remunerative career in entomology, I decided to 

 follow my early medical inclination, and at least to gain the 

 degree of Doctor of Medicine. As it happened, the old Colum- 

 bian University, an institution founded and largely sustained by 

 the Baptist Church (it is now the George Washington Uni- 

 versity, a non-sectarian institution), had a medical department 

 founded seventy or eighty years earlier. The professors were 

 practically all men who were in medical practice in Washington, 

 and, for the convenience of government employees, the lectures 

 began at four-thirty in the afternoons and continued until nine- 

 thirty, after which all dissecting and certain other things had to 

 be done. Office hours for government employees were then from 



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