August, '09] JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 271 



weight used by most of the best stations. A good half-tone cannot be 

 made from a poor photograph. If your photograph is thin, muggy 

 and lacking detail, do not try to have it engraved, as your efforts 

 will be doomed to failure. Again, no matter how good the photo- 

 graph or engraving, if the paper be poor or if, worse, you have a poor 

 printer, do not try to do much with half-tones. Many of our bulle- 

 tins would be better without illustrations than with the ink splotches 

 now inserted with long legends explaining to the reader that in such 

 and such a part of the cut there is supposed to be an insect, or which 

 totally fail to bring out the point which it is desired to illustrate. The 

 illustrations have two purposes : First, to show the appearance of 

 insects or plants etc., which can be more readily illustrated than 

 described, and second, to hold the attention of the reader and rein- 

 force the text. The American public is becoming used to reading in 

 pictures, due to the catering of niost of our leading magazines to 

 its taste for pictures, and we may as well recognize that the average 

 man reads as much thru the pictures as he does thru the text. If pos- 

 sible, have the illustrations come on the same page as the text refer- 

 ring to them. Very often a small illustration of some stage of the 

 insect inserted at the point of its description in the text is much more 

 effective than when tucked away in a plate with many other figures 

 at the back of the bulletin. Make the legends of the figures as 

 interesting as possible. A'ery often a cut may be made much more 

 attractive by cutting out the background, especially when the back- 

 ground is gray and tends to obscure the main point of the illustration. 

 Variety is given the illustration by vignetting the backgrounds which 

 gives a pleasing contrast to the uniformity of square edged cuts. 

 Both the cutting out of backgrounds and vignetting can be done by 

 any good engraver but should not be attempted unless the ability of 

 the engraver is known. Where poor paper is used and good press 

 work cannot be secured on the text, half-tones should be put on coated 

 paper inserts. Much better printing can be secured on such cuts, in 

 any event, than where they are placed in the text with the type, but 

 it is then necessary to bring the cuts together in one place rather than 

 to distribute them thru the text as suggested above. In assembling 

 illustrations for a full-page plate it is best to mount the prints on one 

 sheet and have one solid plate made by the engraver, rather than a 

 number of small cuts. To secure good printing the prints for one 

 plate should be of about the same density, as good results will not be 

 secured where very black and very light prints are placed together 

 on one plate. The different figures in the plate, if it be made up of 

 parts, are usually shown up better if a black line be run around each 



