﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 135 



should receive due attention from the nation. Congress owes it to 

 the farmers of the country, and especially to those of the West, who 

 are in actual need of all the encouragement and aid that can be given 

 to them, that some effort be made to relieve them, as far as it is in 

 human power to do so, of this insect burden which is doing as much 

 as any other to crush them. 



In the case of this locust it is not merely the question of saving 

 to the nation, in future, such vast sums of money as this insect has 

 filched from the producers of some of the Western States (amounting 

 during the past three years to many millions of dollars ;) it is a ques- 

 tion affecting the welfare of whole commonwealths on this side of the 

 Mississippi, and the ultimate settlement of a vast track of country 

 extending from the base of the Rocky Mountains eastward, to which 

 settlement the ravages of the locust in question offer the most serious 

 obstacle. 



Yet what has Congress done ? The Senate committee reported 

 an amendment providing for the appointment of one Commissioner 

 for one year at a salary of |4,000 and expenses, the appointment to 

 be made by the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution and the Commissioner of Agriculture. This amend- 

 ment was very much of a farce. No one denies that our agriculture 

 forms the basis of our national prosperity. No one who has given the 

 subject attention can deny — because the figures confront him — that 

 we often lose upward of $200,000,000 annually from insect depreda- 

 tions. Yet when our producers urge that some national effort be 

 made to relieve them wholly, or in part, it takes on this farcical shape. 

 What the late lamented Walsh wrote ten years ago is true to-day : 



"Let a man profess to have discovered some new patent powder 

 pimperlimpirap, a single pinch of which being thrown into each cor- 

 ner of a field will kill every bug throughout its whole extent, and 

 people will listen to him with attention and respect. But tell them 

 of any simple common sense plan, based upon correct scientific prin- 

 ciples, to check and keep within reasonable bounds the insect foes of 

 the farmer, and they will laugh you to scorn. Probably about nine- 

 tenths of the members of Congress and of our State Legislatures are 

 lawyers, busying themselves principally with law and politics; and 

 the remaining one-tenth are physicians, merchants and manufacturers, 

 with a very small sprinkling of farmers. Is it to be expected that a 

 crowd of men, whose heads are mostly full of such important things 

 as cognovits and assumpsits and demurrers and torts and caucuses 

 and conventions, should condescend to think about 'bugs'? What 

 do they know about farmers, except that they have got votes? Or 

 about farmers' pockets, except that most of the taxes come out of 



