ENTOMOLOGY HOWAED 369 



For many of the needed types of investifjation we as entomologists 

 must train ourseh'es to be self-reliant, but as we broaden out we 

 must beg the help of experts in many different lines. Any one of 

 the many discoveries being made in physics, chemistry, or other sci- 

 ences may touch or may be made to touch our investigations looking 

 toward the control of insects. Some discovery now on the point of 

 being made in one of these sciences may lighten our task.^ 



Primarilj^ in agricultural entomology must we consult the wisest 

 experts in farm management — the clearest-thinking agronomists. 

 We realize, as I have already pointed out, that with many of our 

 methods of farm practice we are encouraging the multiplication and 

 spread of many insects; we are fairly inviting them to overwhelm 

 us. Why waste years of work trying to fight them in one way or 

 another under existing conditions if it be possible, after a full under- 

 standing of their ways, so to vary crop methods as to hit a vital 

 point in their economy without materially lessening crop pro- 

 duction? This has been done in a number of instances. Only the 

 other day one of our English colleagues (Frew) advised a slight and 

 inexjDensive variation in the manuring and cropping of barley, which 

 will do away with the damage b}' a serious insect enemy. A careful 

 study by an expert agronomist of the life-history facts already 

 learned by us about a number of our principal injurious insects will 

 undoubtedly lead to valuable ideas and to the indorsement, from a 

 far-seeing practical side, of suggestions in this direction which some 

 of us may have made. 



There is no scientific man whose cooperation the entomologist more 

 needs than the skilled organic chemist. There are scores of prob- 

 lems of great importance to which the labors of such a man or men 

 should be turned. In the chemistry «f the physiological processes 

 in the insect body he is needed, and he is especially needed in the 

 study of the chemistry of the plants upon which insects feed, in the 

 effort to understand fundamentall}'^ what there is about certain plants 

 that attracts certain insects. For many months, now, that famous 

 investigator, Dr. Frederick B. Power, with the able assistance of Mr. 

 V. K. Chestnut, has been studjdng the chemistry' of the cotton plant, 

 and this is being done on a scale and with an expenditure of time 

 and care never before equaled in such a study. The results already 

 obtained have been of the highest interest from the chemical point 

 of view, and also from the point of view of plant structure and 

 physiology; and there have been developments which may prove to 



' Mention may be made here of Prof. C. K. Brain's just-announced discovery in South 

 Africa of the adaptation of certain radio principles to insect Investigation in which he 

 shows that by the use of microphones the presence of insects may be determined, not only 

 of wood-boring insects, boring in wood, but of Insects In stored grains. 



