FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



great changes in the way scientific measures have been handled 

 by the press in the United States. Back in the 1870's the great 

 metropoHtan daiHes devoted much space to the accounts of the 

 meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, and many will remember that when Thomas Huxley 

 came to the States in 1876 the big New York dailies published 

 his lectures in full. I well remember, in fact, that when I was a 

 junior in college we had to digest these lectures as they were 

 printed in the New Yor\ Tribune. 



But there came a great change and it was a degenerative 

 change. Reports of scientific affairs became greatly shortened. 

 The flippant reporter developed until there came a time when 

 almost no scientific functions or other matters were treated 

 seriously. Intelligent and serious-minded reporters were not 

 assigned to scientific functions. I remember, for example, a meet- 

 ing of the American Society of Naturalists held in Chicago 

 about the end of the last century. The American Society of 

 Bacteriologists was one of the societies that met with the 

 naturalists. Professor F. G. Novy of Ann Arbor was down for 

 a paper on a new bactericide, and I went to hear him. His talk 

 seemed to me to be very important. He had discovered a new 

 compound (I think it was a peroxide of one of the benzols) 

 which was instantly fatal to all forms of bacterial life — as fatal 

 as direct sunlight. And what a field this discovery seemed to 

 open up! But the compound was extremely expensive. As I sat 

 there, listening absorbedly and my mind filled with the great 

 possibilities suggested, a young chap, apparently not more than 

 twenty, who was sitting next to me, whispered to me that he 

 was a cub reporter sent there by one of the great Chicago dailies 

 to report the meeting and that he could not understand the 

 import of Dr. Novy's paper. This incident illustrates very well 

 the news value of scientific stuff to city editors at that time. 



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