75 



agricultural entomology has lagged so far behind horticultural is 

 largely due to the lack in the past of just those facilities for experi- 

 mentation on a large scale and during a term of years which, now 

 that we have them at our disposal, we seem not wholly to appreciate. 



To the foregoing very imperfect summary of recent progress in the 

 immediate applications of economic entomology I shall now be able to 

 add only a few references to some of the more imi^ortant publications 

 of the year, dealing elaborately with single insects especially interest- 

 ing from our i)resent point of view, or bringing together in a more 

 or less exhaustive aud monographic form the facts concerning eco- 

 nomic groups. Under the latter head we may place an article by 

 Bruner, of Nebraska, on the corn insects, published in his report as 

 entomologist of the ISTebraska Experiment Station; a paper on experi- 

 ments with the cranberry insects, contributed by Fernald, of Massachu- 

 i!etts; the admirable, original, and highly valuable work of Osborn on 

 the grass insects ; the model investigations of Comstock and Slinger- 

 land on the wireworms, already mentioned ; Webster's paper on insects 

 Injurious to wheat, in the Bulletin of the Ohio Experiment Station; the 

 paper by H. E. Weed, of Mississippi, on cabbage insects, published in 

 the Experiment Station Bulletin of that State; a bulletin by Smith on 

 the blackberry insects of New Jersey; Bulletins 25 and 27 of the Di- 

 Tision of Entomology, U. S. Department of Agriculture, on the de- 

 structive locusts of the West; a notable discussion of the scale-insects 

 of California by Coquillett, in Bulletin 26 of the siime series; and my 

 own articles on the white grubs and on the fruit insects of southern 

 Illinois, the latter published in the last volume of the Transactions of 

 our State Horticultural Society. 



No single insect has received greater attention recently than the 

 -gypsy moth in Massachusetts, and we shall probably have at this meet- 

 ing an authoritative description of the progress of the remarkable 

 measures taken for its destruction there. We must all hope thnt the 

 result may be such as to establish a lirm precedent for the intervention 

 of the power of the State, guided by expert advice, in emergencies of 

 that description. 



Reference should also be made here to Mally's published work on 

 the cotton-boll worm in the South, and to Webster's on the crane flies 

 in clover and in wheat following that crop. 



Of a great quantity of notes on the life histories and habits of injuri- 

 ous and beneficial insects, and of a considerable number of descriptions 

 of immature stages of those whose life-history has been hitherto but 

 imperfectly known, I can here say nothing. The entomologists in the 

 newer States have an extraordinary opportunity — which they are not 

 slow to improve — for new work of this kind, and even for the discovery 

 and description of new economic species. Nor can I pause to consider 

 advances in apiculture, nor in the culture of the silk-producing insects, 

 i An exhaustive treatment of the topic which naturally falls to me would 

 0757— No. 2 2 



