ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 
PHILADELPHIA, PA., FEBRUARY, I9QI4. 
The Influence of Insects on Civilization. 
The discoveries of recent years of the parts played by in- 
sects in the transmission of diseases have demonstrated, as 
never before, how civilization may be retarded by creatures 
formerly so commonly despised as unworthy of serious atten- 
tion. The Panama Canal, the health of Italy, of India, of 
Havana, of Rio de Janeiro, of New Orleans, are now familiar 
examples of the influence of the hexapods on human prosper- 
ity. Sir Ronald Ross has gone so far as to suggest that the 
downfall of Greece was largely due to malaria, and malaria 
means the Anopheles mosquito, a conqueror greater than 
Alexander. No less striking is the effect produced by insects 
which in large numbers, through a series of years, devastate 
a staple agricultural product. 
Dr. W. E. Hinds, of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment 
Station, in a paper on “County Organization in the Boll Weevil 
Campaign,” read at the recent Atlanta meeting of the Amer- 
ican Association of Economic Entomologists, considered that 
the spread of the boll weevil eastward through the Southern 
States has been more of an advantage than a loss to the human 
population, inasmuch as it has operated to diminish the dele- 
terious practice of planting cotton year after year on the same 
ground, to encourage the habit of rotation of crops and to 
bring about the necessity for greater co-operation between the 
planters and other members of the community, a co-operation 
which has not stopped with measures to combat the weevil but 
has subsequently extended to those for bettering the com- 
munity in other ways. 
We find no entomological entries in the indexes to Buckle, 
but the future historian of civilization cannot neglect the influ- 
ence of insects on the processes he attempts to describe. 
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