66 
to give real effect to all our work, it seems to me that this topic is equal 
in practical importance, not to any other merely, but to all others taken 
together. 
I need only appeal to the experience of any of our older entomolo- 
gists for abundant evidence that the methods of statement, publication, 
and enforcement now generally made use of fall far short of their final 
end. Take the literature of the Hessian Fly and of the Chinch Bug as 
examples. Has the general average agricultural practice of regions 
overwhelmingly infested by these insects been really modified materi- 
ally by all our work and writing, or does it go on substantially as it 
did fifty years ago? We have made adeep and decided impression, 
here and there, beyond a doubt; frequently, however, by merely second- 
ing the efforts and sifting and substantiating the evidence of the 
farmer, aS in modern methods for the Codling Moth and the Cur- 
culio; but the farmer has not responded with anything like the same 
readiness and perseverance to the suggestions of the investigating - 
entomologist; and means of reaching, instructing, and persuading him 
should be carefully studied and discussed by us with a view to their 
radical improvement. 
After this preface I hope that you may receive with patience a few 
suggestions on this subject, drawn from my own ten years’ experience 
as an official entomologist. 
In the first place, I am inclined to think that we are very likely to ~ 
forget, when we prepare our reports, that we are writing largely for 
men to whom entomology is a perplexing, obscure, and displeasing 
subject, of which they know little or nothing, and especially nothing 
good; but that on the other hand, they are frequently experts in crop 
inspection, far quicker, as a rule, to observe injuries to their crops than 
we are, and more likely to discriminate them nicely. If we had always 
borne this fact in mind, I think that our economic articles would 
usually have taken quite a different form. The crop injury and its 
characteristic appearances would have led in our discussions, and 
remedial and preventive measures would have followed thereupon as 
immediately as practicable, the insect itself being brought in, if at 
all, in a strictly subordinate way, as an aid to the recognition and 
classification of the injury, and as a guide in some instances to the 
selection of an economic method. Now, all but invariably, we put the 
insect and its characters, its habits, and its life history in the fore- 
ground, and make everything else depend upon a knowledge and rec- 
ognition of these. In short, in dealing with insect injuries to agricul- 
ture we have commonly insisted that the farmer must become an ento- 
mologist, at least so far as agricultural insects are concerned, whereas, 
in fact, the practical entomologist should have first become a farmer, 
at least so far as is necessary to a detailed and critical knowledge of 
insect injuries to crops and to the application of agricultural methods 
of procedure for their control. How far we have come short of this 
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