ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD « 357 



Attention has often been called to the increasin^^ spread of in- 

 jurious insects from country to country by the rapidly increasing 

 speed of ocean voyages. Our latter-day Japanese beetle and Euro- 

 pean corn borer inspectors appreciate as can no one else how the 

 hundreds of thousands of automobiles and our greatly improved 

 roads help the spread of these and many other pests. As early as 

 the peace conference at Portsmouth at the close of the Russo- 

 Japanese War, when thousands of vehicles from regions infested 

 by the gipsy and brown-tail moths brought their loads of sightseers 

 to Portsmouth, there resulted an immediate extension of the range 

 of these imported pests. And when T. Chalmers Mitchell and his 

 companions attempted to fly from Cairo to the Cape a few years 

 ago, the possibilities of the airplane as a spreader of insects was 

 demonstrated, as I heard Mitchell state at a meeting of the 

 Zoological Society of London in 1920. 



So what is termed " advancing civilization " is not only encour- 

 aging insects to multiply almost heyond hounds^ hut it is facilitating 

 and hastening their spread in many ways. 



In the face of all this, what we have done and what we are doing, 

 much as we have accomplished, especially during the past 20 years, 

 is a trifle — a comparatively insignificant series of things done and 

 learned compared to what we have still to do and to learn. 



In the first place we must have the public behind us. The public 

 must be made to appreciate the fact that it is a vital necessity to the 

 future of humanity that we should learn everything about insects; 

 that keen and highly trained men should be studjdng everj' aspect 

 of insect life, and that chemists, engineers, plant physiologists, bac- 

 teriologists, and scientific men of many specialties must be called in. 

 They must learn that the study of no aspect of insect life is a trivial 

 pursuit, as their fathers thought, and they must learn that the ento- 

 mologists are the men on whom the world must depend for much of 

 its future prosperity. 



This education of the public is going on rapidly, but we must 

 help to speed it up. A number of strong writers in the newspapers 

 and in the magazines have found the topic attractive and interesting. 

 Many of us have grasped opportunities to address lay audiences of 

 all kinds on the general subject, and all of us who can speak more 

 or less forcefully in public must never lose a chance to drive this 

 particular lesson home. 



Incidentally there is an enormous opportunity in the teachers' 



colleges, in the great summer sessions of such institutions as the 



Teachers College of Columbia University in New York, for example, 



where 12,000 teachers from all over the United States come together 



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