1908 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 23 



EVENING SESSION— THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5th, 1908. 



A public meeting was held in the Massey Hall building of the Ontario 

 Agricultural College, and was largely attended by members of the Society, 

 students of the College and Macdonald Institute and visitors from the city. 

 The chair was taken by Dr. Bethune, Professor of Entomology. The 

 proceedings were very much enlivened by musical selections excelle^ntly 

 rendered by the College Orchestra. 



The chairman, in his opening remarks, referred in feeling terms to the 

 great regret that was felt by all at the absence of their President, Dr. James 

 Fletcher, who was seriously ill in a hospital at Montreal. Being the forty- 

 fifth annual meeting of the Society, of which he, the chairman, was one of 

 the founders, he gave a short account of the history of the Society and of the 

 good work which it has accomplished during all these years. He then intro- 

 duced, as the chief speaker of the evening, Dr. E. P. Felt, of Albany, the 

 State'Entomologist of New York, who was widely known from the numerous 

 books and papers on economic and systematic entomology that he had 

 published; though still a young man he had attained a high reputation due 

 to the excellence and thoroughness of his work. Dr. Felt then gave the 

 following lecture on "The Interpretation of Nature," which was illustrated 

 with a large number of beautiful and interesting lantern slides. 



THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 

 By E. p. Felt, Albany, N.Y. 



Our civilization is based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages. The 

 ancient lore of the Chinese, the mystery of the Hindoo, and the culture of 

 the Greek, all have had an important influence upon the development of the 

 human race. The learned man acknowledges his debt to these and other 

 sources of wisdom. None take issue with Pope when he writes : "The proper 

 study of mankind is man." We would go farther and say: The proper 

 study of mankind is man, the earth and the fulness thereof. Even as 

 ignorance of the wisdom of the ancients restricts the usefulness and activity 

 of the individual, so does a failure to understand the laws governing the 

 existence of other forms of life, circumscribe the power of dominant man. 

 In other words, the welfare of man is most closely bound up with that of a 

 number of animals and plants. Detailed knowledge of these latter is essen- 

 tial to continued progress. One can not be separated from the other. 



Nature is kind to the student of economic entomology, since she gives 

 him five or six opportunities to identify an insect, namely, the egg, larva, 

 pupa, adult and work. This kindness is not always so apparent, especially 

 when it is remembered that this abundance and variety of form means a 

 corresponding increase in the number of €ha^acter^s to be memorized, 

 particularly as an entomological constituency frequently expects identifica- 

 tion in all stages. The story is easy to decipher if the page has been pre- 

 viously studied, otherwise its translation may be as difficult as that of the 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not infrequently neither the egg, larva, pupa, 

 adult, work or debris is at hand, and the pntomolocrist mav be called upon to 

 separate fact from poor or absolutely misleading descriptions. In the latter 

 event, it not infrequently happens that an intimate knowledge of local 

 conditions is of vast service in reaching a satisfactory conclusion. 



