THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



truthfulness, and many of my friends, especially those whose 

 sense of humor was somewhat distorted, were inclined to chaff 

 us. Professor Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, a famous chemist and 

 an equally famous joker, once said to me, "I never see you 

 without thinking, 'Let us spray.' " ^ 



We have been joked about our extraordinary but well-founded 

 estimates of money loss, and since we began to talk and to 

 write seriously about the matter a facetious friend said to me one 

 day at the Club, "You are as bad as the roadside advertisements. 

 You make me tired." But I was used to him. He would have 

 made me tired if he had not said it with a twinkle in his eye 

 which showed that he really agreed with me. 



Thus as time went on in the earlier part of the present century 

 more and more men came into the work, more new ideas came 

 to light, and new fields opened up. We gradually came to ap- 

 preciate that we must know absolutely everything about insects 

 from the first segmentation of the egg down to the last detail 

 in the behavior of the adult. Not only must all insects be classi- 

 fied and named, but we must understand their intimate physi- 

 ology and all of the things for which we have no better term 

 than psychological. So as the workers increased in number and 

 new minds became attracted to our problems, we became encour- 

 aged and more hopeful. I used to go to my desk of a morning 

 in an expectant frame of mind. The feeling in the United States 

 among the entomologists had spread all over the world. The 

 entomologists of all nations had come to appreciate the fact that 

 national boundaries did not exist, that we were working for all 



* Here is an example of Clarke's readiness in witty response : He was at the time 

 the President of the American Chemical Society and had not as yet been elected 

 to the National Academy of Science. He was sitting at the Cosmos Club when 

 Dr. Ira Remsen, the President of Johns Hopkins University and President of the 

 National Academy, also a great joker, entered the room and seeing Clarke, said, 

 "How arc you. Professor Clarke? How goes it with the Comical Society.?" "First 

 rate," said Clarke. "How goes it with the Notional Academy.?" 



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