324 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



SYSTEMATICS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 



Everyone at heart is a taxonomist, either by virtue of necessity 

 or because of mere curiosity. From childhood up we want to know 

 the names of things. What is this, that, or the other object— how, 

 where, why, and what? Children at an early age readily learn to 

 distinguish a number of common things— birds, the various wild- 

 flowers, poison-ivy, bees, wasps, and yellow jackets — according to their 

 experience. 



Every good housewife can identify the tiny moth flitting through 

 the bedroom or the parlor if it be a clothes moth. This knowledge 

 has a doUars-and-cents value, for the name of a beast or a pest indicates 

 the method of control to be applied. With further experience she 

 can distinguish this kind or species from one that may more rarely 

 flutter through the house but in more disturbing numbers — the moth 

 that sometimes appears in your packaged grain or cereals. Or per- 

 haps it is the winged ant coming out from under the house that catches 

 her attention. In mere self-interest she will want to know if it is 

 an ant or a termite, which, by the way, is not an ant but an insect of 

 quite another order and family. There are also wood-destroying 

 ants, the carpenter ants, infesting houses, yet these rarely if ever 

 become serious pests. With the identification comes the scientific 

 name, which is the key, the index entry, indeed the only device which 

 will open up for one the world's literature containing the extant in- 

 formation regarding any object, animal, mineral, or plant. If a 

 name cannot be found for it, the object is probably new and unde- 

 scribed, in which case the information regarding it is yet to be 

 developed. 



Indeed, wherever man comes to grips with the problems of life and 

 living, the importance of the names of things is most vital, whether 

 he be concerned with disease, the production of food, or merely safe 

 drinking water. 



The physical fitness of drinking water can readily be determined by 

 chemical analysis, but only by identifying the organisms existing in 

 it, or rather determining the absence of certain of them, can its safety 

 be assured. Among the biological contaminants that need to be dis- 

 tinguished are to be numbered first of all the enteric bacilli and 

 amoebae, the "germs" of typhoid and cholera ; copepods, which are the 

 intermediate hosts of the broad tapeworm of Europe now established 

 in parts of this country ; and a host of other organisms that vary as to 

 locality. Unknown waters are not safe to drink even in the high 

 Arctic with its extremely low, often killing temperatures, for there 

 the melting ice and snow in the spring expose and redistribute the 

 well-preserved refuse of the long winter months from human habita- 

 tions. But please do not look askance at the glass of drinking water 



