1893.] Editorials. — — 1073 
to accomplish the impossible task. Suppose for a moment that the 
various commissions were able to kill every moth except one pregnant 
female, and were then to rest from their labors. In a few years mat- 
ters would be as bad as before. The Massachusetts commission have 
had nothing like such success. Their workmen have undoubtedly 
killed large numbers of these insects but each year shows the moth in 
a larger territory than it occupied the year before and extermination 
is no nearer than it was a dozen years ago. We do not wish to be 
understood as saying that the Gypsy Moth commission has done no: 
good. It has checked the depredations as it can undoubtedly check 
them in the future. But this means, if the present methods are con- 
tinued, a continual drain upon the treasury of the commonwealth 
which will only cease with that millennium which shall work a change 
in the morals of insects as well as of man. 
In its future work the commission should employ as its head a 
trained entomologist who should devote his time, not to the hunting of 
Gypsy Moths in trees, hedge rows and garden patches, but in finding 
and introducing some natural enemy as has been so successfully done 
in the case of the Orange Vedalia in California. Moths, eggs, larvæ 
and cocoons will escape the most careful of field agents, but insect 
parasites will keep the pest in continual check and render the employ- 
ment of an army of expensive workmen unnecessary.—K. 
The numbers of the American Naturalist for the year 1893 were 
issued at the following dates, January, Jan. 11th ; February, Feb. 4th ; 
March March 8th; April, April 5th; May, May 25; June, June 
15th; July, July 24th; August, Aug. 25th; September, Sept. 30th ;. 
October, Oct. 31st; November, Nov. 24th, December, Dec, 13th. 
72 
