354 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 84 



marked contrast to Holland. The native peoples as a whole would 

 have been very difficult to govern harmoniously, to any other people 

 but the Dutch. The great islands of Java and Sumatra are extremely 

 fertile and grow crops of enormous value — sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea. 

 cinchona, rubber, and others of lesser value. The Dutch have had to 

 learn to know the people of these islands, and to cultivate these 

 extremely valuable crops in the most productive manner. They have 

 made a very thorough study of these matters ; they have for genera- 

 tions sent many of Holland's brightest minds to the East Indies to 

 take administrative or technical positions, and the results have been 

 extraordinary from the view-point of applied agriculture as well as 

 of social administration. It is rarely, in fact, that one speaks to a 

 Hollander in a higher position at home who has not served his term 

 in the East Indies. 



In 1896, Dr. L. Zehntner, an entomological expert, began to publish 

 in Java, and he soon began correspondence with the entomological 

 service in Washington, largely in regard to the identity of some of 

 the insects that he was encountering in his economic work. He was 

 obviously a well trained entomologist and quite competent to make 

 careful biological and taxonomic studies of his new material. Many 

 of the pests he encountered were new to science, and he described 

 new species among them in the Coccidae, in the Aphididae, in the 

 parasitic Hymenoptera, and in other groups. Situated as he was, far 

 from the large collections and far from libraries, it is remarkable to 

 see how well his work was done. He was either a very good and 

 careful artist himself or he had the services of one. And evidently 

 his fund for illustrations was not small, because his bulletins for the 

 next ten years were illustrated with colored plates of a rare excellence. 

 He made some mistakes in the placing of some of his new insects, 

 but this is easily forgiven when we remember that he was working 

 in Java. With his Parasitica, his early work showed a much better 

 understanding of the subject than did, for example, the comparable 

 work of Juan Brethes in South America who in a similar way began 

 to publish about parasitic Hymenoptera without a full library and 

 without competent collections for comparisons. 



L. P. de Bussy, a well trained zoologist, was sent out to Sumatra 

 and was made Economic Zoologist of the Tobacco Planters' Experi- 

 ment Station at Deli. A wide-spread insect, Heliothis ohsoleta, known 

 in the United States as an enemy to corn, tomato, cotton, tobacco, 

 and certain other crops and which is here variously known as the 

 cotton bollworm, the corn earworm and the tomato fruit-worm, was 

 found to be damaging the Sumatran tobacco rather seriously. Doctor 



