April, '09] JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 107 



Mr. Marlatt: ^Ir. Chairman. I am very much pleased with and 

 interested in the very thoughtful paper presented by one of the old- 

 est of our members; and I wish to endorse with much heartiness his 

 advice and suggestions. The iield of entomology has increased enor- 

 mously, the number of workers are a hundred times what they were not 

 so many years ago and the amount of money expended has increased 

 at a similar rate. When I entered the service of the Department of 

 Agriculture the lump appropriation was twenty thousand dollars. Our 

 appropriation now runs up to nearly half a million and the same 

 relative increase has been seen throughout the country. With all this 

 increase in entomological workers and funds and facilities, there has 

 been a notable sub-division of the work. All the old problems that 

 the pioneer entomologists attempted to solve are now attacked with 

 a minuteness and specialization that was not then possible. The re- 

 sult is that as this old work is gone over the information is vastly in- 

 creased, and errors are being constantly found. That is as it should 

 be. The only point I wish to make is, that here and there you find 

 in this new work a spirit of rather sharp criticism of the mistakes of 

 the elders. It seems to me that this attitude is quite unnecessary. 

 We should be charitable and remember that in those old daj^s one man 

 covered the field that is now covered by a score. Take, as an example, 

 the white fly work in Florida, which has now been the subject of three 

 years of continuous investigation by three men. Necessarily, they 

 will find some of the older work faulty, and they will make large ad- 

 ditions, but if the spirit of generosity and kindness prevails in these 

 new workers, there need be no unpleasant or sharp criticism in the cor- 

 rections which they necessarily make. 



Looking over the work that is being put out today, the best work 

 is by men who are most courteous and who have least in their writ- 

 ings that is unpleasantly critical. I think that credit should invari- 

 ably be given. It is not necessary to fill pages with references to the 

 writings of others. Credit can be given without interfering with the 

 reputation of the writer in his own constituency and vastly increas- 

 ing his reputation and standing in the field as a whole. I think en- 

 tomologists may take a lesson from some of the other workers in sci- 

 ence. There has been a good deal of controversial writing in ento- 

 mology and bitter enmities have arisen through unnecessarily sharp 

 criticism, through failure to approach one another in a spirit of friend- 

 liness and courtesy. I have quite an intimate acquaintance with 

 chemists, and I think, as a body, the chemists are more closely knit. 

 They get more fun out of their meetings; and they seem to have a 

 more friendly spirit toward each other than that sometimes exhibited 



