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and should see that these are printed and distributed in numbers which 
might be called enormous as compared with those now commonly 
issued. As the preparation of such monographs is a great and irksome 
labor, wasteful of the time of the investigator, and yet requiring a con- 
scientious thoroughness which only the investigator is likely to devote 
to it, and as the work once well done by one need not be done again, 
but may be made available for all, it seems to me that this is a matter 
which our association should take up through some general standing 
committee on codperation, or by means of some less formal agency of 
subdivision and assignment. 
Thardly need repeat that in these synoptical articles the thoroughly 
practical method of treatment and presentation is called for most of all. 
They should be articles on crops and not on insects, and should be 
writtenfrom the standpoint of a farmer turned entomologist, rather than 
that of an entomologist vainly trying to see through a farmer’s spec- 
tacles. 
The viva voce presentation of entomological matter at the farmers’ 
institute, with its opportunities for explanation and illustration, for 
question and answer, and for the off-hand discussion of subjects of liv- 
ing interest to the time and place, is a new agency for the distribution 
of economic information which none of us will neglect. It has, however, 
the disadvantage that its utility depends on correctness of apprehen- 
sion and accuracy of memory on the part of those little accustomed to 
take and hold instruction from the living teacher. I will, myself, never 
give another farmers’ institute address, if I can help it, which is not 
followed up with a printed résumé, distributed to the audience. 
But, now, supposing full and accurate information widely dissemi- 
nated and in the actual possession of those for whom it is especially 
designed, we have next the most difficult task of all: to make sure 
that it will be practically applied. What shall we do and what advise 
to secure a common action in accordance with known and admitted 
facts? Shall we leave this to the individual and to the coercion of 
neighborhood opinion, or, these failing, shall we look to the law and 
to agencies established under the law? In short, are we practically 
individualists or socialists in our leanings? The official entomologist, 
I need hardly say, need not shrink from the word socialism, for as a. 
Government official he is himself a socialistic product; as much so as 
the experiment station or the public school. Without attempting here 
to debate so large a question, I venture to express my own opinion 
that we should look to the law and to some regularly established system 
of inspection and penalty enforced by law to supplement the sponta- 
neous agencies of society where these fail to protect the industrious 
and intelligent against the destructive consequences of neglect on the 
part of the idle and the ignorant. There are regions—some parts of 
my own State worst infested by the Chinch Bug, for example—where 
there seems really to be no choice between legal compulsion on the one 
ee ae 
et ee ee ee eee eee 
