FALL NUMBER 83 
something of the structure and life history of the insects that 
they desired to destroy. As an illustration of the futility of 
blind effort in an attempt to control an insect, I have in mind 
the spraying operations against the citrus whiteflies in Florida. 
Power sprayers were bought and an attempt made to spray the 
groves in a whole county (Orange County, 1906) regardless of 
the time at which the fly was most susceptible to sprays, with 
the result that spraying was once more condemned as a failure. 
The facts were known to the entomologists that had been in the 
State prior to that time, but whether these facts had not been 
sufficiently featured in the bulletins or were ignored by the 
parties undertaking the spraying, I cannot advise. At all events, 
the whitefly of citrus is now successfully controlled by spraying. 
To sum up this part of my paper, it is apparent that no facts, 
ideas, principles or laws, tho apparently insignificant and useless 
at the time of discovery, are useless, but will eventually be ap- 
plied in the life of mankind. The world can never know whether 
a fact is economically useful and important until it finds out, and 
for that the world may need to wait a thousand years. 
From motives of a pure desire to know, any one could study 
insects (I mean the insects themselves, not books) from the 
following points of view; in fact each point of view is a science 
by itself: Taxonomy; Morphology; Ecology; Psychology—be- 
havior, instincts; Paleontology. 
TAXONOMY OF INSECTS 
This includes description and classification of insects into 
orders, sub-orders, families, genera, species, and sometimes 
varieties. (I should perhaps explain that the term Taxonomy 
means classification, and is used in the same sense whether ap- 
plied to the classification of insects, other animals or plants.) 
This phase of entomology has probably been more extensively 
studied than the others, and was for a considerable period of 
the last century the principal subject of insect study. Classi- 
fication may also have been the very first phase of entomology 
to engage students of nature. It would only be natural to ar- 
range a collection of insects into groups according to their 
likenesses and give the groups names. Aristotle was apparently 
the first to leave a record of this kind. He made a classification 
of animals, and his classification of insects is only a part of the 
whole. 
