THE NEEDS OF THE WORLD AS TO ENTOMOLOGY ^ 



By L. O. HowAKD 



I have chosen an ambitious and rather sweeping title for this 

 address. It woiikl make a good title for a book, I may possibly use 

 it as a title for a book I have been preparing for some time. It Avill 

 serve my present purpose, however, to head soms thoughts that ha^'e 

 come to me after about 60 years of greater or less attention to insects. 



Not so many years ago this would have been considered a mixed 

 audience, an audience surely at one in that all are interested in ento- 

 mology, yet mixed since it contains inv stigators whose sole aim is 

 apparently the study of this vast assemblage of extraordinary forms 

 of life in some one or several of its aspects from that ennobled curi- 

 osity Avhich lies at the bottom of so much valuable scientific re- 

 search — the effort to answer the continual questions "why" and 

 " how " — and since it contains also investigators Avho are striving to 

 overcome the agencies which are destroying many of the vital needs 

 of the human species. 



But now it is coming fully to be recognized hj all of us who are 

 working with insects that, while the man who is trying to supply 

 imtnediate relief from great loss by the most immediate measures 

 is the man for the immediate emergency, every man who studies 

 insects and who records his results is doing greatly needed work and 

 work that sooner or later will help to lead to a close understanding 

 of insect life which may bring about its control by man. 



I will not speak here of the rapidly increasing appreciation by 

 the intelligent part of the public of the tr> mendous importance of 

 entomological work; but of another fact, which is that, in spite of 

 the good we have done and are now doing, month by month the 

 insect problem becomes more serious. It is far more serious to-day 

 than it was 20 years ago, although the workers in economic ento- 

 mology have doubled in that time and the money expended in 

 entomological investigations has probably trobled. It is enormously 

 more serious than it was 50 years ago when a mere handful of men 

 were laying the groundwork for our rapidly growing structure. 



1 Annual Address before the Entomological Society of America, Washington, December 

 31, 1924. Reprinted by permission from Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 

 Vol. XVIII, No. 1, March, 1925. 



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