FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



fact that the Mexican Cotton Boll Weevil had crossed the Rio 

 Grande and was a threatening factor in the production of cotton 

 in Texas and potentially in the whole Cotton Belt. To cap the 

 climax, an English surgeon in the Indian medical service, Major 

 (afterwards Sir) Ronald Ross, discovered in 1898 that the mos- 

 quitoes of a certain genus (Anopheles) were the sole transmitters 

 of malaria. 



Is it any wonder that people began to appreciate the im- 

 portance of insects as dangerous enemies to mankind, and that 

 Congress and the state legislatures began to appropriate more 

 money for the study of these enemies? 



Nevertheless, when we view the situation from our present 

 standpoint, the action of the world as a whole seems rather 

 slow. The best trained men in the university laboratories con- 

 tinued their intensive work on non-economic creatures, and 

 practically only in the agricultural colleges were studies of in- 

 jurious insects carried on. But in these colleges and in the state 

 agricultural experiment stations and in the Federal Bureau of 

 Entomology at Washington there was an almost immediate 

 response. More and more men were trained. More and more 

 bright young men were attracted to the subject as a means of 

 livelihood, and this was encouraged by larger appropriations 

 from legislative bodies. 



So the federal organization of which I happened more or less 

 accidentally to be chief assumed a new importance. Appropria- 

 tions began to jump. The service took on a Bureau rank. More 

 and more men were taken in. Soon our investigations began 

 necessarily to spread into other countries. The obvious reason 

 for this was that nearly two-thirds (reckoned by species) of our 

 first class insect enemies — that is, those insects that damage 

 us to the extent of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually 

 — were of foreign origin. 



[156] 



