16 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 9 



of the present ideas and activities of humanity. We are,, therefore, 

 to be congratulated both on the splendid progress of our profession 

 and on its harmonious relations to humanity. On the other hand, 

 lest we become lulled into a sense of security regarding the state of 

 our science, lest we become filled with a dangerous sense of complete 

 satisfaction with our past and present achievements, and lest we mag- 

 nify too much the desirability of a practical preparation for our work, 

 I am going to take this opportunity of urging the need of a broad, 

 thorough and rigid training for our future activities as economic 

 entomologists. 



It is well to realize that we are yet far from a satisfactory solution 

 of many pressing entomological problems. A large part of the wide- 

 spread interest shown in economic entomology at the present time is 

 due not so much to the striking results already achieved as to the 

 increasing demand for the accomplishment of greater things and the 

 solution of new and more perplexing problems. Many of the simpler 

 problems of our work have been fairly well solved. The more obvious 

 and easy steps have been taken. We are now confronted with the 

 more abstruse questions of insect control^ the proper solution of which, 

 calls for the highest sort of mental preparation, for the broadly trained 

 type of mind — the mind that has been developed until it has become 

 imaginative, until it is able to dream dreams. The speaker has not 

 the time or space to defend the thesis that imagination is necessary 

 even in an applied science. He will only ask if the men who invented 

 the steam engine, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the telephone, 

 or the monotype machine did not have minds replete with imagina- 

 tion. Yet these apphances are among the most practical in use today 

 by the human race. There are big things in the field of economic 

 entomology awaiting the minds that have become trained until they 

 are able to see far ahead of mere facts — until they have attained the 

 intuition of seers and the imagination of poets. 



LeBaron in 1870 exercised a trained judgment and responded to 

 the impulses of an imaginative mind w^hen he recommended that an 

 apple tree should be syringed with Paris green for canker worms; 

 and what a remarkable suggestion it was and what a revolution it 

 started in the control of insect pests in this country! Harris, a recluse 

 among books, for he was a librarian most of his life, wrote a classic 

 in American economic entomology'. Nothing but his lively imagina- 

 tion and broad interests developed by a thorough training of the mind 

 enabled him to accomplish so much under so many difficulties. 



What a vision of the wonderful means of the multiplication of 

 certain parasites and perhaps of their increased efficiency in the control 

 of noxious insects was unfolded to us by Marchal's discovery of poly- 



