iw) 
Annals Entomological Society of America [Vol. VIII, 
so helpful that our two associations representing them are 
more like the right and left hands of the same body than two 
independent individuals. In bringing our difficult and im- 
portant topic before what is virtually a union meeting of these 
two principal associations, we are simply bringing both hands 
to bear in the performance of a task which is too great for 
one hand alone. 
Applied entomology is peculiarly an American subject, 
and here if anywhere in the world it should have accomplished 
its ends or should at least be in sight of its goal; and yet we have 
to acknowledge that, after generations of work upon them, 
many of the great long-standing problems of our American 
entomology are still unsolved, and that the people of our country 
are still suffering enormous losses of various description be- 
cause of this fact. It is not because we do not know what we 
commonly call the entomology of the chinch-bug and the Hes- 
sian fly and the white-grubs and the cotton-moth that we are 
so nearly at our wit’s end in our efforts to devise means for their 
control; it is because the knowledge of their entomology merely 
is not sufficient for the purpose. This line of attack was, in 
fact, thoroughly tested by the earlier economic entomologists 
of America. Harris, Fitch, Walsh, and the young Riley were 
entomological observers whose applications of entomology were 
mere inferences from their observations. The older Riley, 
Howard, and Slingerland, were among the first to make serious 
use in economic inquiry of the experimental method of scien- 
tific induction; and now we havea small army of workers apply- 
ing their principles not only in precise, intensive work in the 
laboratory and the insectary, but on the broad scale of 
actual outdoor practice in varied environments, and on the 
long scale of season after season and year after year, postponing 
final conclusions until their premises stretch through a decade 
and extend over a continent. 
It is when we search for specific reasons for our successes 
here and our failures there that we are driven to a scrutiny and 
analysis of controlling conditions of every description, and so 
find ourselves involved in studies so far outside entomology, 
commonly so-called, that we are obliged to apply for assistance 
to the physiologist, and the chemist, and the physicist, and the 
meteorologist, arid the geographer, and the agriculturist, and 
