EBPOET. 



Office of the State Entomologist, 

 Albany, December 14, 1887. 

 To the Honorable Board of Regents of the University of the State of 

 New York : 



Gentlemen. — In accordance with the law of 1883, regulating the 

 State Museum of Natural History, I herewith beg leave to present 

 to your Honorable Board the following report of some of my labors 

 and investigations during the past year. In connection therewith, 

 I will refer incidentally to some entomological studies which are 

 being prosecuted by others. 



As in preceding years, my studies have been almost entirely in 

 the direction of the economic relations of insects. So important 

 are these relations to the farmer, the gardener, the fruit- 

 grower, the florist, the manufacturer, the exchanger of produce or 

 manufactures, and, in consideration of our numerous household 

 pests — to every member of community, that no apology is needed 

 if they are permitted, for the time, to claim almost the exclusive 

 attention of your entomologist. It was to meet this need of reliable 

 information of our insect pests, and of the most ef3(icient means of 

 controlling their ravages, that this Department was established in 

 1880, and has since been sustained by the State. Yet, pure science 

 must ever form the basis of the applications of science. The proud 

 position that economic entomology has attained, is but the result 

 of the earnest, patient, and long-continued scientific study that has 

 preceded it, and without which it would have been an impossibility. 

 To particularize : a very large proportion of the insects of the United 

 States have been described, named and classified, — our catalogues 

 embracing about twenty-five thousand species. The several orders 

 and suborders have been taken up by special students who have 

 devoted their best energies and the greater part of their lives to 

 descriptive and classificatory study. Thus : Dr. LeConte, whose 

 name is inseparably connected with American Coleopterology — 

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