FIGHTING INSECT PESTS 183 



States government. More than a million dollars have 

 been expended, a score of professional entomologists aided 

 by hundreds of paid helpers have been employed, and all 

 the means known to scientific insect fighting have been tried. 

 The most interesting feature of the great struggle is the im- 

 portation from Europe and Japan of various natural insect 

 enemies of the moth. Already more than fifty kinds have 

 been introduced and experimented with, and it is for the 

 discovery of some kind that will prove as efficacious against 

 the soft winged gypsy as the Australia lady-bird beetle 

 against the cottony cushion scales- of California that the 

 entomologists and New Englanders are working and pray- 

 ing. The gypsy moth if not fought against would probably 

 ruin all the trees of New York and New England in a very 

 few years. 



But all this fighting of insects by the use of other insects, 

 bug versus bug, as a Californian entomologist describes 

 it, is but a small and, so far, a very small part of the war 

 waged against insect pests in our country. There are 

 indeed many entomologists who hold that the older ways 

 of fighting, the use of so-called "artificial" remedies, as 

 poisonous sprays, preventive and repellent bands and washes, 

 traps and means of burning and crushing, and last but by 

 no means least the high culture and strengthening of the 

 attacked plants are ways that will never be satisfactorily 

 replaced by the newer so-called "natural" remedies. 



Among these artificial remedies the most conspicuous, 

 widespread and generally applicable are the poisonous 

 sprays. These are of two general categories, just as in- 

 jurious insects are of two general categories. Insects are 

 either of sucking mouth, taking liquid food, plant sap, or 

 animal juices, by thrusting a sharp beak through the outer 

 covering of leaf or twig or fruit or animal body and sucking 

 up the sap or blood, or they are of biting mouth, nipping 

 off and chewing bits of plant or animal tissue and swallowing 



