Man's Mortal Enemies 3 



and the lion hide in the deep jungle or the bushy veldt, away 

 from the powerful firearms that man's ingenious brain has 

 devised to make up for his lack of physical strength. But 

 the outcome of that age-long battle between mankind and 

 the insea world is still uncertain. 



At times the insect hordes get the upper hand, and mil- 

 lions of human beings drop dead from the poison injected 

 into their bodies by mosquitoes, lice, fleas, or ticks, while 

 others die through eating food poisoned by the ubiquitous 

 fly as he makes his daily round from the manure pile, the 

 privy, or the garbage can to the kitchen table. But even 

 these deaths, horrible as they may be, are no worse than the 

 millions of other deaths due to famine, caused all too often 

 by the incessant appetite of inseas for the same food that 

 man consumes. According to Dr. P. N. Annand of the U. S. 

 Department of Agriculture, destruction of crops by agricul- 

 tural inseas costs United States farmers two billion dollars 

 a year, or as Dr. L. O. Howard puts it, devastation by insects 

 undoes the work of a million men. 



At other times, man gains a significant victory over his 

 enemies. He concocts a vaccine to neutralize the effect of an 

 insect's bite; he destroys the breeding grounds of his assail- 

 ants; or he develops a poison that wipes out the insects faster 

 than they can breed. But the latter is a difficult task, for 

 birth control is certainly not praaiced by our tiny foes. New- 

 born insect children can look forward to becoming parents 

 in a few days or even a few hours; and, although human quin- 

 tuplets make the headlines throughout the world, an insect 

 mother who produced only five offspring at a time would 

 hang her head in shame at this evidence of her virtual steril- 

 ity. 



