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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1409. 



and respect, there are evidently no great attractions 

 to lead him to a science which in nine oompajiies 

 out of ten with which he may associate promises to 

 signalize him only as an object of pity or contempt. 

 Even if he had no other aim than self -gratification, 

 yet ' ' the sternest stoic of us all wishes at least for 

 some one to enter into his views and feelings, and 

 confirm him in the opinion which he entertains of 

 himself ' ' ; but how can he look for sympathy in a 

 pursuit unknown to the world, except as indicative 

 of littleness of mind? 



This popular impression, so well described 

 by Eirby, continued, and jokes, anecdotes, car- 

 toons, novels and dramas perpetuated the old 

 idea. But even during the active lifetime 

 of the speaker there has come a change. 

 Good men, men of sound laboratory train- 

 ing, have found themselves able in increas- 

 ing numbers, through college and government 

 support, to devote themselves to the study of 

 insect life with the main end in view to con- 

 trol those forms inimical to humanity, and 

 to-day the man in the street realizes neither 

 the number of trained men and institutions 

 engaged in this work nor the breadth and im- 

 portance of their results not only in the prac- 

 tical affairs of life but in the broad field of 

 biological research. The governments of the 

 different countries are supporting this work in 

 a manner that would have been considered in- 

 credible even five and twenty years ago, and 

 this is especially true of the United States and 

 Canada and hardly less so of France and Italy 

 and Japan and 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 com- 

 bining their studies of agricultural entomology 

 and crop diseases under the term phytopath- 

 ological studies, or an Epiphyte Service 

 (.Service des Epiphyties), as in France, and 

 this is unfortunate, since it obscures to a cer- 

 tain extent the great issue of insect warfare 

 and divides the great field of economic ento- 

 mology in a most unfortunate way. Let us 

 hope that the movement will not grow. Let the 

 entomologists cooperate with the pathologists, 

 both plant and animal, wherever there is some- 

 thing to be gained by such cooperation, 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 the 

 largest government support. Every state has 

 its corps of expert workers and investigators. 

 The federal government employs a force of 

 four hundred trained men and equips and sup- 

 ports more than eighty field laboratories scat- 

 tered over the whole country at especially ad- 

 vantageous centers for especial investigations. 

 And there are teachers in the colleges and uni- 

 versities, especially the colleges of agriculture, 

 who are training clever men and clever women 

 in insect biology and morphology and in ap- 

 plied entomology both agricultural and medical. 



All this means that we are beginning to real- 

 ize that insects are our most important rivals 

 in nature and that we are beginning to develop 

 our defense. 



While it is true that we are heginning this 

 development, it is equally true that we are only 

 at the start. Looking at it in a broad way, 

 we must go deeply into insect physiology and 

 minute anatomy; we must study and secure a 

 most perfect knowledge of all of the infinite 

 varieties of individual development from the 

 germ cell to the adult form ; we must study all 

 of the aspects of insect behavior and their re- 

 sponses to all sorts of stimuli — their tropisms 

 of all kinds; we must study the tremendous 

 complex of natural control, involving as it does 

 a consideration of meteorology, climatology, 

 botany, plant physiology, and all the operations 

 of animal and vegetal parasitism as they affect 

 the insecta. We must go down to great big 

 fundamentals. 



All this will involve the labors of an army of 

 patient investigators and will occupy very 

 many years — possibly all time to come. But 

 the problem in many of its manifestations is a 

 pressing and immediate one. That is why we 

 are using a chemical means of warfare, by 

 spraying our crops with chemical compounds 

 and fumigating our citrus orchards and mills 

 and warehouses with other chemical com- 

 pounds, and are developing mechanical means 

 both for utilizing these chemical means and for 



