352 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1215 



insect type is one of the most persistent 

 types in nature. Having its origin in Car- 

 boniferous or perhaps Silurian times, it has 

 persisted and flourished, adapting itself to 

 almost all coneeivahle conditions until at 

 ,the present time it is, among all the types 

 of living things, the chief competitor of the 

 recently evolved human type for the con- 

 trol of the earth. 



Man labors for months to produce a food 

 crop- — he must share it with many species 

 of insects. He builds himself a house with 

 infinite toil — it must hafbor insects as well. 

 He makes garments for himself — ^without 

 great care on his part they are eaten by in- 

 sects. His harvested food is destroyed by 

 them ; his blood is sucked by them ; he sick- 

 ens and dies from a multiplication of dis- 

 ease germs which they have introduced by 

 their bites or with which they have con- 

 taminated his food, and after his death they 

 consume his body. 



Let us begin with food crops. Always a 

 vital subject, this has become one of the 

 most intense interest under the present 

 world conditions. In time of peace and be- 

 fore the intensified effort was begun to feed 

 not only ourselves but a large part of the 

 rest of the people of the world, the damage 

 by insects to the food products of the 

 United States was estimated at approxi- 

 mately $1,300,000,000 per year, or roughly, 

 about ten per cent, of the whole. This, esti- 

 mate, as expressed in monetary terms, is 

 open to criticism for the obvious reason that 

 a fall in production is followed by an in- 

 crease in price. But the loss may equally 

 be estimated in terms of human food and 

 consequently of human vitality. A loss of 

 ten per cent, of the possible food, and not 

 considering the question of waste, means 

 strictly that a given number of people must 

 live on a ration of ninety per cent, of the 

 possible; not necessarily that ten per cent, 

 of the people must die of starvation. 



Accepting the monetary terms as the 

 most convenient, let us see what the zoolo- 

 gists have done in this direction for the 

 "welfare of humanity." 



In 1907 the question arose (it was pro- 

 pounded by Mr. Littlefield, at that time 

 chairman of the Committee of the House 

 of Representatives on Expenditures in the 

 Department of Agriculture) as to how 

 much the work of the Department of Agri- 

 culture saves to the country annually. Sec- 

 retary Wilson passed this question on to 

 the chiefs of the bureaus. The Chief of the 

 Bureau of Entomology passed it on to the 

 heads of different sections of the work of 

 the bureau. When the entomological esti- 

 mates were handed in they summed up the 

 total of $500,000,000, and they appeared 

 to the Chief of the Bureau to be incredibly 

 large, and the total was scaled down to less 

 than one half. When the resulting esti- 

 piate from the chief was submitted to the 

 Secretary of Agriculture it appeared to 

 Mr. Wilson to be still very much too large 

 ^(possibly in comparison with the saving 

 resulting from the work of the rest of the 

 Department of Agriculture), and he in 

 turn scaled it down to more than one half 

 of this half. When the totals came to Mr. 

 Littlefield in his committee room, the esti- 

 mates of the whole department appeared 

 to him to be very much too great, and he 

 scaled down both individual items and 

 totals, including the estimate from the Bu- 

 reau of Entomology. The result as pub- 

 lished in Mr. Littlefield 's report gives the 

 annual saving from the labors of the Bu- 

 reau of Entomology (which is only one of 

 the organizations of zoologists at work in 

 this direction) as $22,750,000. But who 

 shall say whether the original estimates of 

 the chiefs of sections in the bureau were not 

 more nearly correct than this ? In fact, it 

 seems more likely that the entomologists 

 Jiave saved to this country much more 



