THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



One more Congressional incident apropos to this general 

 subject. Fifty years ago the final reading of the Appropriations 

 Bill for the Department of the Interior was before the House, 

 and I happened to be in the Visitors' Gallery. The Honorable 

 J. D. Cox of Ohio, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee 

 (and himself a naturalist), had the bill in charge and was mak- 

 ing slight verbal corrections and corrections in punctuation, to 

 which the members were perfunctorily and sleepily agreeing. 

 Coming to the portion on the Hayden Survey of the Territories, 

 and to the paragraph relating to permission to publish, he sug- 

 gested the addition of the words "and the allied sciences" to 

 the words "on geology," and the House assented without 

 awakening. This enabled the publication by the government of 

 many important monographs which would have seemed trivial 

 and possibly useless to the then average congressional intelligence. 



Since those days, fortunately. Congress has become better edu- 

 cated in such matters, and here and there in the House and in 

 the Senate are to be found men with a keen appreciation of the 

 value of practically all sorts of scientific work — many, in fact, 

 who realize that research work without an immediate practical 

 end is quite worth while and worthy of even government 

 support. 



But my initial interest in Congress didn't last. Holding an 

 assistant's position in a small department, I had nothing to do 

 with the appropriations which were then handled entirely for 

 our department by the Commissioner of Agriculture. In fact, the 

 Department did not develop to the point where the Commis- 

 sioner, or later the Secretary, needed any assistance before the 

 Agricultural Committee until after I became Chief of the Bureau 

 in 1894. Before that time my chief. Professor Riley, was always 

 worrying about appropriations, and, without the consent of his 

 superior officer, was constantly pulling wires of different kinds 



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