February, '19] BALL: ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 27 



zation. They are its foundations — its attitude towards truth — and its 

 vision. 



Let us measure ourselves by these standards. As a society we have 

 ■been feHcitated and congratulated, our valuable works enumerated, 

 our contributions heralded, our recommendations adopted, until we 

 have become complacent and self-satisfied. Optimism and self-con- 

 gratulation are good and will carry one far, but sometimes they lead 

 into by-paths of ease and forgetfulness, to that relaxation of aggres- 

 siveness and vigilance that comes with age, while youth, vigor and the 

 critical attitude that comes with introspection and unfulfilled ambi- 

 tion, would have guided away from the danger and held us to the path 

 of progress. 



We have also been handicapped in establishing our foundations, by 

 the fact that we are dealing with by far the largest single group of 

 living things. Not only are they countless in number, but infinite in 

 variety and complexity, reaching out in their adaptations into every 

 other form of life, involving in their reactions, almost the entire 

 animate and inanimate world. With a field so vast and varied, so 

 manifestly impossible to cover, it has probably been easier to be con- 

 tented with the superficial and the immediately important, rather than 

 to search deeper for the foundation stones upon which, alone, an 

 enduring science could have been builded. 



Twenty years ago a bomb shell was dropped into our midst, by a 

 president who dared to question the very foundations of our economic 

 science. His exposition of "The Lassier-faire Philosophy" raised a 

 storm of protest and denunciation. Predictions were freely made, 

 that it would cut off our financial support and cripple our develop- 

 ment. We are still strongly supported and if anything, too popular! 

 Whether for good or evil, that presidential address is the one that 

 remains vivid and outstanding in the memory of the writer. It has 

 tempered many an exuberance; it has been an antidote to dogmatism 

 and a cure for complacency. In questioning our foundations it caused 

 us to pause and consider them as seriously at that time, as we must do 

 again today. 



What, then, is the status of our foundations? Have we completely 

 solved the problem and mastered the intricate relations of a single 

 injurious insect, or have we skimmed the surface of the knowledge of 

 thousands? Have wc exhausted the possibilities of discovery of one of 

 the factors of insect development or control? Do we know the relative 

 limits of egg production of our injurious species? Are- the number of 

 «ggs produced relatively stable or influenced by environmental factors? 

 Do we know the number of annual generations of our insects and the 

 factors that control those numbers? Do we understand the periodicity 



