Nova Scotia Entomological Society 



PROCEEDINGS, 1915 



ADDRESS. 



By Dr. A. H. McKay, Superintendent of Education. 



T T gives me a great deal of pleasure to see a movement of 

 •*- this kind going on without my initiative. It is a splen- 

 did illustration of the great advance which has been 

 made in the appreciation of the study of science since, 

 say, the year 1887, when with the late Dr. Hay, the 

 Educational Review was founded as the teachers' 

 organ for the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Its first 

 number contained the beginning of an illustrated series of lessons on in- 

 sects for the schools: and to-day De Wolfe of the Normal and Perry of 

 Acadia, are still brilliantly carrying on in the same publication the 

 Nature Study cult. One of the first of the leading teachers of that day 

 to encourage the work in the Review was the late Dr. John Brittain, of 

 Macdonald College, the father of the Professor W. H. Brittain, who is 

 well known to be the power behind the present movement. 



It is over a quarter of a century since; but I must acknowledge the 

 origin of my inspiration in the Ontario Entomological Club, a branch of 

 which you are to-day organizing in Nova Scotia. Membership in the 

 Ontario Club had given me regularly its Annual Reports, which on ac- 

 count of its popular character and good figures was worth far more than 

 the annual fee itself. But in addition it brought the monthly Canadian 

 Entomologist, with its more technical descriptions and articles. I have 

 been a regular member of the club up to the present day; and can rec- 

 ommend the same course to every teacher who can appropriate one dol- 

 lar for so interesting and practical a key to the wonders of the insect 

 world. 



The great war of the future will be between man and insect. Man 

 is greater; but the insect propagates more rapidly. Were the insects 

 not divided against themselves in six years the human race would be 

 starved into extinction. Even now in the United States alone, it is esti- 

 mated, they tax the farm, fruit and live stock produce over one thousand 

 million dollars a year. 



But they attack man more directly than by capturing his food. 

 House and stable flies carry disease germs and plant them invisibly on 

 his food. The mosquito inoculates him with malaria, or yellow fever. 



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