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hand and the slow and enormously expensive operation of the law of 
natural selection on the other. Either the slow processes of social 
and economic revolution must be allowed to take their destructive 
course, carrying down too often the bright and willing farmer with the 
hopelgssly sluggish mossbacks all around him, who breed insects by 
the bushel to devour his crops with their own, or we must have a State 
or county board, acting in conference with the official entomologist, 
empowered to recommend a protective procedure in cases which are 
clear beyond all reasonable controversy and to assign penalties for a 
failure to conform. I would, myself, advise both State and county 
boards—perhaps those agricultural boards already existing—on the 
ground that it is useless to attempt to enforce measures, however 
plainly necessary, against the common sentiment of the locality. 
Next and finally, I beg to call attention to some facts growing out of 
the dispersal of most of us, one or two in a place, and to the territorial 
limitations set upon the work of those of our membership who are in 
State official positions. The boundaries of the States we supervise are 
usually artificial and not natural, especially not entomological or agri- 
cultural, from which follows the fact that several of us are interested, 
in very many cases, in the same problems, presenting themselves under 
identical or very similar conditions, and the further fact that some of 
these problems require for their solution a broader territorial range 
than we are expected to take. We are also commonly so pressed upon 
by a multitude of minor practical matters of special but temporary 
interest, that no one of us can command the time for continuous study 
of large general questions, either theoretical or more directly practical, 
which affect all of us more or less, but which remain from year to year 
substantially untouched. 
There is in the Mississippi Valley what is known as the “‘chinch-bug 
belt,” running from southern Illinois through Missouri and over the 
larger part of Kansas, a district where two or three dry years may 
always be expected to bring that arch pest of agriculture to the front. 
We are all at work upon it, but each for himself, without concert of 
plan or regular interchange of ideas and results. On the other hand, 
none of us are studying the general subject of the reasons, geological, 
agricultural, or climatic, for the existence of this well-marked belt. If 
lam asked why southern Illinois is thus infested while southern Indiana 
is relatively free, I can merely guess at a more or less probable reply. 
Further, we occasionally find, when far advanced on some piece of 
unmitigated drudgery, some laborious and tedious compilation of the 
literature of a single crop, for example, that one or two others in neigh- 
boring States have long been busy with the same subject, and that 
much work has thus been duplicated to no good end. [I lost the larger 
part of a year’s work of one assistant in this way not long since. 
Now the remedy for these and other defects which I have not time to 
specify is not general direction, or even supervision—we are too 
