8 



anything about liis business from the entomologist. The essential 

 j^roblem, then, upon which success depends in a large measure, is how 

 to gain the confidence of the agriculturist and convince him both of 

 your honesty of purpose and of your utter disinclination to offer advice 

 on any but your own specialty. Carelessness in this matter may result 

 as in an instance when I was peddling ballots in a hotly contested 

 election in Brooklyn. A voter asked me for a set of ballots and I 

 foolishly inquired whether he wanted the straight ticket or some 

 pasters. He thought I wanted to know too much and was immediately 

 gobbled U13 by the other fellow, who gave him an entire handful of 

 ballots and kept his mouth shut. It has surj^rised me sometimes to 

 find that even in a small State like Xew Jersey there are localities 

 where the work and object of the Experiment Station is practically 

 unknown, and yet I believe Ave reach a larger percentage of its farmers 

 by means of our bulletins tlian in almost any other State in the Union. 

 I have found that the only way to secure attention and respect for the 

 suggestions made is to have personal acquaintances everywhere, to 

 take i^art in their meetings and even in some cases picnics, to answer 

 freely all sorts of questions, no matter how absurd, and to be inter- 

 ested in the newest and most startling facts in insect life which they 

 have themselves observed again and. again and know are true. My 

 latest addition to knowledge of this kind is that the white grub found 

 in manure piles produced the cicada, or harvest fly, and thej^had been 

 bred so time and time again. 



Another i)roblem of some interest is how to deal with newspapers. 

 Kow, this does not seem to come exactly within the scope of the ento- 

 mologist, and I hasten to amendby limiting m^^ remarks as applying to 

 the entomological matter in them . In some cases the most absurd misin- 

 formation is given currency, and the farmer, who has no other literature 

 and swears by his paper, accumulates a store of curious facts that are 

 often troublesome to deal with. Electroplate articles are particularly 

 vicious in this direction, because they may appear all over the country; 

 and I have seen in a well-known farm i^aper, with a department edited by 

 a well-known entomologist, a reallj- good paper by the editor followed 

 without any sort of spacing by an utterly absurd and incorrect note, 

 put in, of course, simply to fill space and without consultation with the 

 editor of the department, who, nevertheless, seemed to be responsible 

 for it. In IS^ew Brunswick one of the daily papers has an occasional 

 farm column from which I learn many new facts in economic entomol- 

 ogy. I have tried to induce the editor not to put these in without first 

 submitting them to me, and he has promised so often without keeping 

 his i3romises that I conclude he never reads them himself until they 

 are printed, and the selection is determined entirely by the number of 

 inches covered. I have never been able to learn who writes these arti- 

 cles or how they originate; but it is at least a question w^hether we can 

 not do something as a body to make the i)ress, and esi)ecially the 



