tent or details of the infliction. It is yet too early to assure ourselves that the 

 active poisons, used to destroy the new pests of a staple article of food, may 

 not seriously affect our cattle by destroying the salubrity of our wells and 

 streams that receive the rain- fall from our poison dusted fields. 



Among the sixty insects, depicted in the last United States report, there are 

 fortunately several that destroy other injurious insects. Nature, if left to her- 

 self, seems to regulate the balance of life better than man can do. Do what 

 we will, the water of the aquarium becomes turbid, though the natural pond or 

 ocean preserves its transparent equilibrium of vegetable and animal production. 

 Legislation rudely disturbs the natural balance. I have been disposed to think 

 that even the attempt to preserve certain birds may have increased instead of 

 diminished certain insect pests that the birds refuse, but which are destroyed by 

 other insects which the birds devour. Certainly some birds which refuse that 

 disgusting pest, the hairy caterpillar, greedily devour the ichneumon fly that 

 destroys it. Legislation thus far fails in that instructive sense of the law of de- 

 mand and supply which nature, let alone, seems to exhibit. But I think there 

 can be no question that the destruction of the forests is especially in this con- 

 nection perilous to the husbandman. Forests not merely supply an immense 

 amount of food as agreeable to pernicious insects as our crops, but they give 

 harbor to their insect enemies and to many shy but useful insect-eating birds 

 that are rarely seen by men. It is worthy of remark that the prairies, which 

 are denuded of trees, seem to be the prolific nursery of armies of insects de- 

 structive to our cultivated crops. A little illustration of the real efiiciency of 

 human methods is shown in the fact that the common glutinous fly paper, set 

 in a window near a wood, will catch certain white-faced insects, looking like 

 the common house fly, but which, it is said, destroys the potato bug. Human 

 invention perhaps makes little discrimination between friend and foe. But ag- 

 riculture is becoming an exact science. We do not know enough of the lost 

 arts to scale our own advancement. We do not know how much Egyptian ag- 

 riculture owed to any chemical agents other than the water of the Nile, when 

 Egypt was the granary of Rome. Probably ever renewed and bountiful Na- 

 ture tenderly relieved the agriculturist from the necessity of chemical inquiry. 

 When, too, in the feudal times of England, meat, as in most warlike societies, 

 was the principal food, herds had such a range of country that they could 

 choose the necessary variety of herbage; and the palate of the grazing animal 

 regulated the delicate proportion of albuminoids and carbon- hydrates necessary 

 to keep him in condition. An ox, a little off his appetite, or a cow going dry, 

 did not need to consult a professor of chemistry, when too much woody fibre 

 in the hill pasture could be modified by some other herb rich in albumen or by 

 the soft, fresh grass of a neighboring valley. The cattle ate "wiser than they 

 knew ;" and, with a free range, on chemical principles. But the farmers were 

 undoubtedly ignorant. The low proportion of price that meat bore to corn in 

 the feudal times is suggestive of barbaric life. In 1314, a grass fed ox was 

 worth sixteen shillings; but wheat cost about two shillings a bushel, and two 

 and a half shillings a year later. Near a hundred years afterward, in 1401, 

 whe^t sold for two shillings a bushel, and six years later, in 1407, a cow was 



