68 FIELD ZOOLOGY. 



expect to find beetles. The order includes some of our 

 most beneficial insects and some of our worst fruit-eating 

 and grain-eating pests. 



Government entomologists have given us some very 

 startling figures on the enormous yearly losses in growing 

 crops due to insects of the harmful sorts. According to 

 Riley, the yearly loss from grain- and fruit-eating insects 

 foots up $15,000,000 more than the cost of all our common 

 schools and our higher institutions of learning. Losses 

 are usually estimated in dollars and cents; that is, what 

 the products would have brought us if they had been 

 allowed to mature. But an equally serious view, if not 

 more serious, is the loss sustained from the point of view 

 of the time and labor expended without a fair return. 

 We are told that an annual loss of ten per cent, is suffered 

 yearly by agriculturists and fruit-growers the world over. 

 This is enormous, and would not be endured year after 

 year if it occurred from almost any other cause. When 

 one reflects, it becomes plain that this loss comes about 

 mainly through ignorance of the causes, and partly 

 through neglect of known effective measures of prevention, 

 as well as through the conscious or unconscious disturb- 

 ance of the laws which preserve the balance of nature, 

 whose free operation serves to enable one pest to keep 

 in check another pest, or one tribe of predaceous animals 

 to decrease the numbers of an injurious tribe. Take, 

 for example, the indiscriminate slaughter of the prairie 

 and woodland snakes; hardly anyone would allow a 

 blue racer or a bull snake or a garter snake to escape ; and 

 yet the gradual killing out of these snakes in certain 

 neighborhoods has led to large crop losses through the 

 unrestrained increase of gophers, chipmunks, mice, and 

 other animals which constitute the food of these valuable 



