January 19, 1922] 



NATURE 



79 



War Against Insects.^ 

 By Dr. L. 0. Howard. 



COUNT KORZYBSKl, in his recent remark- 

 able book, " The Manhood of Humanity," 

 gives a new delinition of man, departing from the 

 purely biological concept, on one hand, and from 

 the mythological-biological-philosophical idea on 

 the other, and concludes that humanity is set apart 

 from other things that exist on this globe by its 

 iimc-hinding faculty, power, or capacity. This is 

 another way of saying that man preserves the history 

 of the race and should be able to profit by a know- 

 ledge of the past in order to improve the future. 

 It is, indeed, this time-binding capacity which is 

 the principal asset of humanity, and this alone 

 would make the human species the dominant type 

 of the vertebrate series. But, biologically speaking, 

 there is another class of animals which, without 

 developing the time-binding faculty, has carried the 

 evolution of instinct to an extreme, and has in its | 

 turn come to he the dominant type of another great | 

 series, the Articulates, or the Arthropods. As 

 Bouvier puts it, 



Man occupies the highest point in the vertebrate 

 scale, for he breaks the chain of Instincts and assures 

 the complete expansion of his intelligence. The 

 insects hold the same dominating position in the 

 Articulates where they are the crowning point of 

 instinctive life. 



Unlike the Echinoderms and the Molluscs, which 1 

 have retained their hard coverings or shells, and \ 

 have therefore progressed more slowly — for, as ' 

 Bergson says, " The animal which is shut up in a 

 citadel or a coat of mail is condemned to an exist- 

 ence of half sleep " — Vertebrates, culminating in 

 man, have acquired the bodily structure which, 

 guided in man by the equally acquired intelligence, 

 has enabled him to accomplish the marvels which 

 we see in our daily existence. Moreover, the Articu- : 

 lates have in the course of the ages been modified 1 

 and perfected in their structure and in their biology 

 until their many appendages have become perfect 

 tools adapted in the most complete way to the needs 

 of the species, until their power of existing and of 

 multiplying enormouslv under the most extra- 

 ordinary variety of conditions, of subsisting success- j 

 fully upon an extraordinarv variety of food, has i 

 become so perfected and their instincts have become | 

 so developed that the culminating type, the insects, ; 

 has become the most powerful rival of the culmin- 

 ating vertebrate type, jonan. 



Now this is not fteognised to the full by people 

 in eeneral — it is not realised bv the biolo<rists them- 

 selves. We appreciate the fact that agriculture i 

 suffers enormouslv, since insects need our farm pro- j 

 ducts and compel us to share with them. We are 1 

 just beginning to appreciate that directly and in- | 



1 Abridged from the presidential address to the American Association for 

 the .Advancement of Science delivered on Dcccmher 27, ig?i, at Toronto. I 



directly insects cause a tremendous loss of human 

 life through the diseases that they carry. But apart 

 from these two generalisations we do not realise that 

 insects are working against us in a host of ways, 

 sometimes obviously, more often in unseen ways, 

 and that an enormous fight is on our hands. 



It is difficult to understand the long-time compara- 

 tive indifference of the human species to the insect 

 danger, but even during the active lifetime of the 

 speaker there has come a change. Good men, men 

 of sound laboratory training, have found themselves 

 able in increasing numbers, through college and 

 Government support, to devote themselves to the 

 study of insect life with the main end in view of 

 controlling those forms inimical to humanity, and 

 to-day the man in the street realises neither the 

 number of trained men and institutions engaged in 

 this work nor the breadth and importance of their 

 results, not only in the practical affairs of life, but 

 also in the broad field of biological research. The 

 Governments of the different countries are support- 

 ing this work in a manner that would have been con- 

 sidered incredible even five and twenty years ago, 

 and this is especially true of the United States and 

 Canada, and scarcely less so of France, Italy, 

 Japan, South Africa, and, at least until four years 

 ago, Russia. 



It may be worth while here, however, to point 

 out that certain European countries are combining 

 their studies of agricultural entomology and crop 

 diseases under the term phytopathological studies, 

 or an Epiphyte Service {Service des E-piphyties), as 

 in France, and this is undesirable, since it obscures' 

 to a certain extent the great issue of insect warfare 

 and divides the great field of economic entomology 

 in a most unfortunate way. Let us hope that the 

 movement will not grow. Let the entomologists co- 

 operate with the pathologists, both plant and 

 animal, wherever there is something to be gained 

 by such co-operation, but let us keep the respective 

 fields entirely clear. 



The war against insects has, in fact, become a 

 world-wide movement which is rapidly making an 

 impression in many ways. Take the United States, 

 for example, where investigations in this field are, 

 for the time being, receiving generous Government 

 support. Every State has its corps of expert 

 workers and investigators. The Federal Govern- 

 ment employs a force of four hundred trained men 

 and equips and supports more than eighty field 

 laboratories scattered over the whole countrv at espe- 

 cially advantageous centres for especial investiga- 

 tions. Also there are teachers in the colleges and 

 universities, especially the colleges of agriculture, 

 who are training workers in insect biology and 

 morphology and in applied entomology both agri- 

 cultural and medical. 



NO. 2725, VOL. 109] 



