WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 153 



a very efficient officer. A State act of 1883 provided for a State 

 Board of Horticulture, and the position occupied by Cooke was 

 abolished. 



The interest of this man in entomology probably arose from 

 the fact that his business as a box-maker was endangered by the 

 probable increase of fruit enemies. In 1883 he published a book 

 entitled " Injurious Insects of the Orchard, Vineyard, Field, Gar- 

 den, Conservatory, Household, Storehouse, Domestic Animals, etc.. 

 With Remedies for Their Extermination." Such portions of the book 

 as were obviously written by Mr. Cooke himself are interesting 

 though naive, and the word " Extermination " in the title was evi- 

 dently his own choice. 



Fortunately, he was able to borrow a good series of illustrations 

 from Riley, Comstock, and others. In his preface, the author 

 acknowledges the assistance of D. W. Coquillett, a trained entomolo- 

 gist who had left Illinois not long before and had settled in southern 

 California since he was threatened with tuberculosis. Prof. E. O. 

 Essig, who has been preparing an historical work on California ento- 

 mology, writes me that, although Coquillett's assistance is acknowl- 

 edged, he is inclined to think that he had little or nothing to do with 

 any of Cooke's manuscripts. Professor Essig infers this from the 

 fact that Cooke did not include in his bulletin many of the interesting 

 insects that had been studied by Coquillett in southern California and 

 from the fact that communication was not easy between two such 

 widely separated men. As to acknowledgments, it is interesting to 

 note that Cooke in his preface acknowledges, in addition to Coquil- 

 lett's help, the assistance of the man who bound his book and also 

 the help of the foreman of the printing company who, it seems, was a 

 careful proof-reader. Until I consulted Professor Essig, I was of 

 the opinion that Coquillett must have written many pages of the 

 Cooke book. 



On the whole, however, Cooke was a very useful man. He surely 

 did no harm, and equally surely he did a great deal of good. Unfor- 

 tunately, the new office succeeding his was filled by a series of, I will 

 not say unwise men, but men who were badly informed and badly 

 advised on the subject of injurious insects ; one of them, at least, 

 being a man whose bona fides apparently was not of the highest rank. 

 As a result, the farmers and fruit-growers of California were offi- 

 cially misled for many years, and the teaching at the Agricultural 

 College of the University, unfortunately, did little to ofifset this. 



In 1888, when the Australian ladybird was brought over and lib- 

 erated the Citrus groves of the State from the blight of the white 



