FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



interest in insects was so great. But my individual work was 

 petty compared with the work of many men in the Bureau and 

 in the state organizations. 



Think of a young man not long from an agricultural college, 

 sent suddenly to start a camp laboratory, with a half dozen 

 assistants and plenty of supplies, on one of the vast Arizona 

 catde ranges, to investigate the ravenous and extremely injurious 

 Range Caterpillar. Think of Dr. Hunter, educated at the Uni- 

 versity of Nebraska and teaching temporarily at the Agricultural 

 College of Iowa, sent down to southern Texas to begin work on 

 the Cotton Boll Weevil and to study a great crop with which 

 he was previously unfamiliar. And yet Wildermuth was entirely 

 successful in Arizona, and Dr. Hunter not only became an au- 

 thority on everything connected with cotton and pointed out at an 

 early date to the Southern planters a perfectly competent way 

 to grow cotton successfully in spite of the Weevil, but gained the 

 affection and respect of the whole South. Think of the dozens 

 of young men sent to foreign countries, to nearly all of the 

 countries of Europe, to Japan, to China and to India, to Central 

 America, to South America, to Australia and to other parts of 

 the world, a few of them linguists and others furnished only 

 with a keen desire for success, great resource and indomitable 

 perseverance. How I wish that the stories of some of these men 

 could be collected and published! 



The foreign search for parasites unquestionably appeals to the 

 imagination more than the work done in our own country. It 

 involves to an extreme qualities on the part of the workers that 

 are not called upon to the same extent in work at home. I have 

 allowed myself to tell stories about two of these men in "The 

 Insect Menace." I should like to repeat them here, but haven't the 

 space. In the home work — that is to say, in the United States — 

 the sense of adventure is naturally not so great, yet there is 



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