WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 20'J 



would have to go and get them. So they let him go, and naturally he 

 did not return. He used to laugh heartily in telling this story, at the 

 idea of a French lieutenant becoming an Arabian accoucheur. (Ann. 

 Soc. Ent. Fr. 1875, p. 251.) 



EARLY EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 



We have been accustomed of late years to think of economic ento- 

 mology as an American product. On account of its very great devel- 

 opment in this country, far beyond that in any other country, its recent 

 developments have overshadowed a great deal of important work that 

 was done in Europe long before agriculture in America had assumed 

 a very great importance — when the American population was small 

 and when only a small portion of the land had been turned into farms. 

 American economic entomologists have grown too patriotically ego- 

 tistical. Look back 60 years and read what Dr. A. S. Packard said in 

 the introduction to his " First Annual Report on the Injurious and 

 Beneficial Insects of Massachusetts " (1870). He complains that we 

 are not making investigations in economic entomology at all com- 

 parably with the Europeans, and states that in Europe the subject 

 " has always attracted a great deal of attention." He goes on to make 

 the astonishing statement that " in the densely populated countries of 

 Europe the losses occasioned by injurious insects are most severely 

 felt." 



For very many years we have not glanced at the early publications 

 of European writers ; we have forgotten that there were so many. 

 The average American worker of today may remember to have seen 

 Curtis' " Farm Insects " or Kollar's " Treatise on Insects Injurious 

 to Gardeners, Foresters, and Farmers," but that is all, unless he 

 should be interested in forests, since the works of Ratzeburg, Eichhoff, 

 and others are well known to all foresters. 



Hagen, in preparing his great " Bibliotheca Entomologica " for 

 publication, evidently spent a great amount of time in his analysis of 

 the mass of works listed, and he published at the end of his second 

 volume more than a hundred pages in fine type of what he called a 

 Sachregistcr. Examining this part of the Bibliotheca carefully, the 

 modern entomologist will be surprised to find that there had been 

 published prior to 1863 a very large number of papers on the different 

 kinds of damage done by insects — so large a number in fact that 

 Hagen devotes 1 1 double-column pages to their mere listing under 

 appropriate names. 



All these years we have been considering this work of Hagen's 

 (it has become known colloquially among the workers in this country 



