186 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



what most of us are actually submitting to year after year, a fact that 

 none of us care to admit. 



In no other country perhaps upon the face of the earth are insect 

 injuries so serious and general as in the United States — a fact that it 

 J s difficult to comprehend, yet it is only too true. Our several crops 

 are attacked by a greater number of insect pests, and the losses that 

 they inflict upon each of these are invariably in excess of those oc- 

 curring in European countries. There are, of course, several direct 

 causes for this condition of affairs. Some of these we cannot be re- 

 sponsible for, but for others we must be held directly accountable. 

 Only a few of our various agricultural products are native to Ameri- 

 can soil, most of our fruits, grains, and garden vegetables having been 

 imported from foreign countries. Along with these, in many in- 

 stances, their attacking insect enemies were also introduced simulta- 

 neously or subsequently. A number of our household pests have also 

 been introduced, as have the parasites which infest our domestic ani- 

 mals and pets. In America the large areas devoted to special crops 

 has a tendency to increase the numbers of injurious insect enemies by 

 furnishing an abundance of food supply, as well as magnified scope 

 for development and increase. On the other hand we are too careless 

 in our methods of cultivating these products of the soil to watch the 

 insect enemies with a view to keeping them in check. From our 

 abundance we do not miss the ten to twenty-five per cent which the 

 insects annually collect, and, therefore, overlook their work of devas- 

 tations. 



THE IMMENSE NUMBER OF INSECTS. 



In number of species, insects far exceed those of all the other classes 

 of the animal kingdom combined, viz., mammals, birds, reptiles, 

 fishes, crustaceans, worms, molluscs, etc. There have been, at least 

 calculation, as many as 350,000 distinct species described, while fully 

 that many more remain to be characterized. So rapidly are the new 

 or undescribed forms being added to the public and private collections 

 of the world that the specialists, who are occupied in this task, find it 

 impossible to keep up with the work of naming and describing them. 

 As an example of this inability to keep up with the new discoveries, 

 a few references will suffice. There are in the British museum alone, 

 at this time, fully 12,000 unnamed species, while other collections of 

 any extent, both in this country and Europe, contain like unworked 



