6 
insect, and never has so much and diversified national legislation on an 
insect matter resulted. At no previous time also have more earnest 
and widespread efforts been made to prevent the spread of an insect 
pest or to exterminate it where it had secured a foothold. 
What has all this excitement, agitation, and work demonstrated? 
Have we actually prevented the further spread of this scale insect? 
Have we accomplished by our artificial efforts in any degree its exter- 
mination? In other words, what are the practical results of the vast 
amount of work done and money expended ? 
In the same vein we may ask ourselves: Has an important insect pest 
ever been exterminated? Does not the locust still flourish, and is not 
the cankerworm still a burden? Are not all the insect plagues of our 
forefathers to the remotest times still with us? The commendable 
industry lately shown in some quarters in delving into the writings of 
the ancients in their reference to insect pests emphasizes the fact that 
many of the insects with which we contend nowadays were familiar to 
the very oldest writers. 
In our efforts to control the normal and perhaps inevitable course of 
nature in any particular instance, as, for example, in our attempt to 
prevent the further spread and effect the extermination of the San 
José scale and other similarly well-established introduced pests, are 
we not merely repeating and putting into effect the boast of the 
courtiers of King Canute that at his command the tide would roll 
back; and are we not, like that good old king, though unwittingly, 
giving a practical demonstration of our own impotence by having the 
tide of failure roll up around our bodies? 
In the foregoing introductory remarks the writer may seem to have 
aSked questions which he can not answer, and to have stated problems 
the solution of which he can not give. Whether this be true remains 
to be demonstrated, but in his present mood he feels like voicing his 
doubts as to the practicability of much of our present effort and 
indulging in heresies perhaps; but if the interrogatories are vain and 
the doubts unjustified, they will at least not have been harmful and 
may Stimulate the presentation of the real truth. The excuse, if one 
be required, is that opportunity, except in the case of such annual 
functions as the present, rarely offers for general and outside views of 
our special work and for philosophizing, or, perhaps, more properly, 
speculating, on its larger aspects. Normally one’s eyes are keenly 
fastened on some small field of research or practical application, and 
one’s whole energy is absorbed in making the most of every opportunity 
in whatever special investigation may be in hand, and it is not often, 
publicly at any rate, that one can break away from the narrower point 
of view and take a broad survey of world conditions as influenced 
by time in the abstract rather than in concrete days and years. 
Therefore, even at the risk of being charged with sermonizing and of 
thrashing old and well-worn straw, I have purposely taken a large 
