34 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 2 



own will be iuvaded by orchard pests to his serious injury, is power- 

 less to protect himself unless he may invoke the aid of the law. He 

 is exposed to needless loss for which he is in no way responsible, 

 and for which his neighbor ought in justice to be held to account. 

 Dangerously infested property is a nuisance, and in my judgment 

 should be universally so treated. It is true, as often said, that edu- 

 cation and enlightened principle are in the long run a better reli- 

 ance than legal compulsion, but the two are not at all incompatible, 

 and we may have both at once. We do not find that laws making 

 forgery or theft a crime weaken the moral sentiment of the commu- 

 nity, but quite the contrary ; neither will the passage and enforcement 

 of laws making the maintenance of entomological nuisances a mis- 

 demeanor operate to diminish the interest of those concerned in means 

 of detecting and measures for destroying such nuisances; they will 

 greatly increase it rather. In my judgment, our San Jose scale 

 laws are as sound in principle as our statutes concerning the conta- 

 gious diseases of stock, and I am of the opinion that every entomolo- 

 gist should seek to have these laws strengthened and extended to all 

 like cases, not only as measures of police but as aids to economic 

 education. 



I cannot bring to a close this address — already too long, I fear — 

 without congratulating you upon the fact that the economic ento- 

 mologist has become of recent years in a great measure a guardian 

 of the public's health as well as a protector of its property, and 

 expressing an earnest hope that all of us favorably situated for the 

 purpose may lay a vigorous hold upon the problem of the relations 

 of insects to disease, and particularly, just now, upon that of the 

 house-fly pest — a problem of the first importance which is far from 

 being solved. Medical opinion seems to be coming rapidly to the 

 conclusion that the house-fly is far more dangerous to us than the 

 mosquito, and it is certainly at present much more difficult to control. 

 Some careful studies to this end, continued through the summer 

 and fall under unusually favorable conditions, by a group of as- 

 sistants in my office, gave us only negative results, reducing us at 

 last to the regular removal of all materials in which house-flies can 

 breed as the only effective means of abating this nuisance; and we 

 found flies breeding in dangerous numbers in a greater variety of 

 situations than we had before supposed. It will be a reproach to 

 economic entomology if we do not soon work this problem out to a 

 finish, and no service which we can render to our kind will be more 

 promptly appreciated or more highly valued. 



But the whole cduntrA' teems with important unsolved problems 



