INSECTS AND ENTOMOLOGISTS: 

 Their Relations to the Community at Large. 



Bv j'Jii.N v>. :!).Mnii, Sc. D. 



(Abstract)* 



The importance ol insects in their relation to the community 

 at large has only become recognized during recent years, and the 

 work of the entomologist is only now receiving the appreciation 

 it merits. Entomologists in the sense used in the address include 

 systcmatists, students of life histories and ecology and collectors; 

 but not those studying only anatomy or histology or insects purely 

 as hosts for disease-producing organisms. 



Insects are injurious to man directly, as parasites, or as pre- 

 datory forms attacking him, c. g., lice in the one ease, biting flies 

 in the other. Incidentally he may be harmed by urticating 

 larva? or such as shed barbed hair, like the brown-tail caterpillars. 



Insects are further injurious as carriers of, and intermediate 

 hosts for, disease-producing organisms: two totally different pro- 

 cesses for, in the first case, the insect has no necessary relation 

 to the disease, c. g., the house-fly to ty])hoid fever, while in the 

 second the insect is a fellow sufferer, and the disease organism re- 

 quires both man and insect to complete its life cycle, as in the case 

 of the Plasmodia causing malarial diseases. The relation of 

 mosquitoes to fevers, of flea to plague, and of Tsetse flies to the 

 sleeping sickness was illustrated, and it was stated that if all 

 dipterous insects, including fleas, could be at once eliminated, 

 mankind would be at once freed from malarial, yellow, dengue, 

 jungle, and several other kinds of tropical fevers, the bubonic 

 plague, .sleeping sickness, filariasis, several forms of eye diseases, 

 certain ulcerating sores of tropical countries, and we would reduce 

 to a minimum enteric fevers of all kinds, lessen the death rate 

 from tuberculosis and jDulmonary troubles, and probably modify 

 or lessen leprosy and kindred diseases. 



* This address was delivered before the Entomological Society of America 

 and its friends on the cvenini; of December 30th, 1909. It Avas a pojnilar i)re- 

 sentation of the subject, jjnifusely illustrated by lantern slides, and not suitable 

 as a whfile for jmblication in a Scientilic Journal. 



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