184 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



properly arranged and named, one is provided with an easy mode of 

 reference when studying an unfamiliar form. During the past few 

 years the study of insects has assumed a direct economic importance 

 aside from the pleasures which the student derives from his collection 

 and his communings with nature. The direct application of entomol- 

 ogy to the advancement of agriculture, horticulture, and sylviculture 

 has made the study second to no other branch of natural history. 

 Since the science of entomology has called to its furtherance some of 

 the best intellect both in this country and Europe, it is no longer con- 

 sidered trifling in its nature. Several of the states have engaged ex- 

 perts in the knowlege of insects and their life histories, while the gen- 

 eral government considers the subject of sufficient importance to keep 

 an entomological division in the department of agriculture, in which 

 a corps of specialists are continually occupied in investigating the in- 

 sects of our country that are sufficiently wide-spread to give them a 

 national importance. 



In order to make the importance of insect study more apparent, Dr. 

 Lintner in the introduction to his first annual report on the injurious 

 and other insects of the state of New York writes as follows : 



"It has been truthfully said that insects have established a kind of 

 universal empire over the earth and its inhabitants. Minute as many 

 of them are and insignificant in size to other than naturalists, yet in 

 combination they have desolated countries and brought famine and 

 pestilence in their train. If unrestrained power could be given them, 

 all counter-checks removed, and they were left free to attack us in our 

 persons, food, clothing, houses, and domestic animals, the consequent 

 disease, poverty, exposure, and want would, in the end, remove the 

 human race from the face of the earth. Air, earth, and water teem 

 with them; there may be claimed for them almost an omnipresence; 

 they swarm in the tropics, and find a suitable home in the Arctic 

 regions. They abound in our homes, our gardens, orchards, fields, 

 vineyards, and forests. In the vegetable kingdom they are found in 

 the seed, the root, the stalk or trunk, the pith, the bark, the twig, the 

 bud, the leaf, the blossom, and the fruit — within or upon every por- 

 tion of the vegetable organism. They are parasitic on our persons, 

 and upon or within all of our domestic animals. They attack and de- 

 stroy fishes and birds. They have their natural home in many of our 

 articles""of food. By their disgusting presence and annoyance they 



