WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD lOI 



During the early i88o's Congress made special appropriations fot 

 the encouragement of silk culture, and Philip Walker was engaged 

 as a Special Agent to take charge of the work. He knew silk culture 

 in France, was a relative of General Serrell who had invented the 

 Serrell electric reel, and was a practical, clear-minded man of good 

 scientific training. He showed himself to be enthusiastic and far- 

 sighted and very honest. He did "not hesitate finally to announce his 

 opinion, after several years of work, that silk culture could not be 

 taken up profitably in this country without an import duty on raw 

 silk. 



Under Riley also was started the bee culture work, first under 

 a field agent. Nelson W. McLain, who studied especially the effects 

 on the honey industry of the arsenical spraying of fruit trees against 

 the codling moth, and later under Frank Benton who came to Wash- 

 ington and started experimental and propaganda work. 



Work in the States, 1878-if 



In the foregoing sections we have made a somewhat arbitrary 

 chronological division. Under the head of Early History and Early 

 American Writers, we have considered the subject down to 1878 when 

 Riley came to Washington, bringing Pergande, and Schwarz and I 

 joined him. Then, after a consideration of insecticides, journals, 

 teaching of entomology, and the work of the United States Entomo- 

 logical Commission, we took up entomology under the Federal Gov- 

 ernment from 1878 to 1894. The only reason why the latter date 

 was taken as a stopping place was that it was the final year of 

 Riley's administration ; and the extraordinary cumulative events of 

 the next eight or ten years seem obviously to demand separate con- 

 sideration. There is no doubt of the tremendous importance of the 

 passage of the Hatch Act and the founding of the State Agricul- 

 tural Experiment Stations in 1888, and therefore of the beginning 

 of a new epoch at that time. There remains, therefore, for consid- 

 eration the work that was being done in the country at large (aside 

 from the Federal Government work) in the period from 1878 to 

 1888. 



During this period some very good work was done and by some 

 admirable workers, but in the light of later history it is difficult to 

 realize how little we really knew and how little attention was paid to 

 the increasingly important question of insect injury. 



During the decade in question (1878-1888) a number of the men 

 who had already begun to write and who are mentioned in a previ- 

 ous chapter continued to publish, and new writers made their appear- 



