2 Editorial 



We hope to secure the support of workers in the Dominions and 

 Colonies. Few people realise how great is the progress made in applied 

 biology in the Over-seas Dominions during the last twenty years and how 

 vital to the success of all tropical industries is the work that is being 

 done in applied biology ; it has become evident in regard to medicine, 

 but is less realised in agriculture, horticulture, animal breeding, and 

 other industries in which investors at home are interested ; neverthe- 

 less, such industries depend for their continued prosperity more and 

 more on research in biology and the application of its results. 



The Association will attempt to form a link between workers in 

 Great Britain and in the Dominions, and the support of colonial members 

 of the Association is as vital to success as that of their fellow-workers 

 in this country. 



Towards effecting this, the publication of a journal may have a 

 great influence and we hope to attract not only the more solid scientific 

 contributions but also notes of progress, of interesting achievements, 

 of practical problems, as they present themselves to members in the 

 various parts of the Empire. 



We have lately made a wide appeal for membership, since we believe 

 that only by organisation will the applied biologist be in a position to 

 establish his subject as one of profound importance in the future welfare 

 of the Empire. The recognition of the important part played by biology 

 is as yet very imperfect, even in the minds of the most advanced officials 

 of State Departments and Colonial Administrations ; large problems, 

 in which technical knowledge is required, are settled M^thout the tech- 

 nical expert being seriously consulted and this is the fault, not of the 

 official mind or of the man-in-the-street's attitude, but of the applied 

 biologists themselves. Medical men are organised and that so success- 

 fully that in a present problem, largely entomological, the medical 

 interest has tended to prevent all recognition of the value and need of 

 the entomologist's services ; we refer to the tse-tse fly problem in Africa 

 but we could quote other similar cases ; at the recent Phytopathological 

 Congress in Rome the technical experts were outnumbered by the diplo- 

 mats and no country had been able to give its experts a deciding voice 

 in the Congress, though the questions involved were admittedly technical 

 and could be decided only by experts. 



We see this attitude daily and every biologist in the Empire suffers 

 from this sooner or later ; it was once a custom in India to appoint a 

 medical officer to any scientific post, simply because science was so 

 vague a conception to the senior official, educated in the classics, that 



