476 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 84 



As indicated in a previous paragraph, owing to the extraordinary 

 increase in the number of horseless vehicles and the consequent 

 enormous decrease in the number of horses in cities and tov^^ns, the 

 house fly problem is by no means as great as it was even a few years 

 ago. The health departments of even small towns understand the 

 best means for preventing the breeding of flies, and even in the 

 country where horses are still used the problem is by no means as 

 great as it was formerly. 



All this refers to the United States. In certain other countries 

 the situation is different, and the house fly still exists in enormous 

 numbers and still carries pathogenic organisms to exposed food 

 supplies. Within a week (it is now May 14, 1928) I saw that the 

 Italian Government had decided to institute mandatory regulations 

 for the abolition of all possible breeding places. 



The Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of 

 Agriculture, having a large staff of trained entomologists who have 

 immediate access to very large collections and libraries, has naturally 

 been appealed to in numerous directions in this field of medical ento- 

 mology and in veterinary entomology as well. The advantages of 

 enlisting the services of this organization were so obvious that as 

 early as 1904 the writer, as Chief of the Bureau, was made official 

 Consulting Entomologist to the United States Public Health Service, 

 and later Senior Entomologist with the grade of Senior Surgeon in 

 the United States Public Health Service Reserve. Also, during the 

 World War he was made chairman of the subcommittee on medical 

 entomology of the National Research Council. 



The work of the Bureau against the cotton boll weevil in Texas 

 in the early days brought the field men into contact with the extensive 

 live stock industry, and they were appealed to for information on 

 several live stock problems in which insects were concerned. A little 

 later certain important cotton men applied for information as to 

 malaria under plantation conditions in the Mississippi delta. As a 

 result, Congress made a small appropriation of $10,000 a year to the 

 Bureau for " investigation of insects affecting the health of man and 

 animals." Under this appropriation some work was carried on for a 

 time on the Rocky Mountain spotted fever in Montana, and for many 

 years important work on malaria and the control of its vector under 

 large plantation conditions has been going on with headquarters at 

 Mound, Louisiana. And at the same time investigations have been 

 made on certain important live stock insects. For many years this 

 work was done under the immediate direction of Dr. W. D. Hunter, 

 who at the same time directed the work against southern field crop 



