26 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 2 



ough student, a clear, methodical writer, a correct and genial gentle- 

 man ; and now in Fletcher, whose late departure has made of this so- 

 ciety a family of mourners, each of us grieving as over a personal loss. 

 Many others have left our little group in these fifteen years, either 

 by the road which we all at last must travel, or drawn away from the 

 difficult and perplexing path of economic entomology into others more 

 inviting to them. 



But serious as our loss has been, our gains, I need hardly say, have 

 far surpassed them. I referred, I remember, in the address I have 

 mentioned, to the time then passing as the classic period in economic 

 entomology — the time of the beginnings of great things, when the 

 larger features of our field were just becoming fairly outlined, when 

 the essential methods of our work were being definitelj^ agreed upon 

 and brought into general use. The older method of observation, de- 

 scription and deductive inference — the method of Harris and Fitch 

 and Walsh and Le Baron, and of Riley in his younger days— was 

 yielding to the method of comprehensive survey, exact experiment, 

 and practical verification in the field, which characterizes all our best 

 recent work ; and among the older men — self-taught entomologists most 

 of us — were appearing a younger generation of well-trained scientists, 

 taught, in many cases, it is true, by teachers who had themselves had 

 no specialized training, but who taught well and thoroughly neverthe- 

 less because they were born to teach, and who had been, consequently, 

 their own first and best-taught pupils. And now this younger genera- 

 tion of well-trained students, whose presence at ^ladison was welcomed 

 with hopeful anticipation, is itself beginning to get a little gray at 

 the temples and a little bald under the crown of the hat. and the coun- 

 tiy is alive with bachelors and masters of science and doctors of phil- 

 osophy, a small army of whom are at work each in his special part of 

 our general field. 



Besides this great and surprising increase in the number of workers 

 on our subject, and this very great improvement in their scientific pre- 

 paration for their work, none of us who are fifteen entomological j-ears 

 of age can have failed to note an equally great and encouraging im- 

 provement in our methods of investigation, in our means and forms of 

 publication, and in ways of bringing our results promptly to practical 

 application by those in whose interest all our studies are made. Our 

 work has become at the same time more scientific and more practical, 

 better based in scientific principles of permanent character and wide 

 application, and better worked out in ways to commend its results im- 

 mediately to our economic constituency. 



Trusting, however, to your recollection of your own observations 



