INSECTS AND THE STATE 



BY E. P. FELT 



Insects outrank all other animals in both niimber and variety of 

 form and exert a vastly greater influence upon human welfare than 

 most realize. 



They feed upon and destroy our garden and farm crops, they 

 seriously injure both fruit and trees of the orchard, they defoliate and 

 ruin shade trees, strip the leaves from forests or tunnel the wood and 

 thus greatly lessen the value of forest products, through annoyance 

 and irritation of domestic animals they greatly reduce the amount 

 and value of dairy products, they establish themselves in dwellings 

 and not only defile and destroy food but are important and in some 

 cases the sole agents in spreading such deadly infections as typhoid 

 fever," typhus fever, yellow fever, malaria and bubonic plague, to 

 mention some of the most important. The loss of agricultural 

 products caused by insects in the United States has been estimated at 

 a billion dollars annually and in New York State it amounts to at 

 least fifty million dollars a year. It is only necessary in this connec- 

 tion to mention the codling moth cf the orchard, the Hessian fly of 

 the wheat field, the boll worm of the cotton field and our latest 

 addition, the European corn borer, an insect which threatens enor- 

 mous losses throughout the extensive corn-growing areas of the 

 United States. A considerable proportion of this waste can be 

 avoided by the adoption of preventive and remedial measures. 



A primary requisite for the prevention of losses caused by insects 

 is a knowledge of our fauna because recognition and difi^erentiation 

 must precede fruitful investigation of habits and biology, which 

 latter is necessary to the most efi'ective control. 



There are actually more species or kinds of insects than of all other 

 forms of animal life. The number in the world has been estimated 

 by various authorities at from one to ten million. We have in the 

 State of New York some twenty thousand different species, each 

 represented by at least four well-marked stages, namely, the egg, the 

 larva, variously known as the maggot, grub or caterpillar, the pupa 

 or chrysalis and the perfect insect or adult. Not a few show well- 

 defined differences between the sexes as well as in the various larval 

 stages, and it is therefore no exaggeration to state that we have about 



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