THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



The rate of growth of the service may be expressed concretely 

 by the statement that, whereas the annual federal appropriation 

 for this purpose in 1894 was about thirty thousand dollars, in 

 1927, when I retired, it approximated three million dollars. An- 

 other striking change in the public attitude that I have already 

 pointed out in another book is the fact that in 1876 the Federal 

 Congress, after a discussion lasting many months, finally passed 

 a bill appropriating eighteen thousand dollars to be expended 

 by a commission of three men (none of them connected with 

 the United States Department of Agriculture) for the investiga- 

 tion of the Rocky Mountain Locust or Colorado Grasshopper. 

 And this was done only after a long delay and after the reduc- 

 tion of the sum from twenty-five thousand dollars and of the 

 number of members of the commission from five to three. 

 Whereas in 1929 the Congress (both House and Senate), after 

 a delay of only a few hours, appropriated four million two 

 hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be spent by the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture in an effort to exterminate the Mediter- 

 ranean Fruit Fly in Florida. 



What shall be said about the years that intervened between 

 1894 and the present time? Obviously, there was great activity; 

 obviously, the problems were very great; and obviously, the labors 

 of the entomologists must have been to some degree successful 

 in order to justify the confidence implied by the extraordinary 

 increase in funds. The whole period is filled with memories of 

 successes and failures, of more or less dramatic incidents, of 

 wide contacts with remarkable personalities. But it is not an 

 individual history. As chief of the federal service, my own 

 life was not what it might seem to an imaginative person. I 

 stuck steadily to a certain amount of research. Dr. B. T. Gallo- 

 way, when Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, once said that I 

 was the only Chief of Bureau to do this. I could not help it: my 



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