412 AIs^NUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1919. 
As a matter of fact, war conditions have intensified the work of 
the entomologists and have enabled them to make the importance 
of their researches felt almost as never before. Long before this 
country entered the war, the warring European nations had met with 
many of these problems in force. We know of the early ravages of 
typhus in the Balkans; we know of the loss through other insect- 
borne diseases in the eastern expeditions; and it is most interesting 
to realize that, although the need for the services of trained entomol- 
ogists with the troops was not realized at fii-st, later every sanitary 
unit in the British Expeditionary Forces carried two entomologists. 
Few people know that as early as 1915 there was a conference of all 
the principal official entomologists of Russia to consider the vital 
question of the loss to stored grains by weevils. Later this same 
matter was taken up by the British Goverimient, and her best eco- 
nomic entomologist was sent out to Australia to endeavor to safe- 
guard Australian wheat accumulating at the seaports for shipment 
to San Francisco, to be milled in this country to replace the milled 
grain which this country had sent to England (this route of ship- 
ment being chosen to avoid the long sea haul from Australia to Eng- 
land with possible added weevil damage during the journey, to say 
nothing of submarine dangers). 
The story of the early efforts of the European governments to 
control the body lice which carry typhus, and, as found out later, 
trench fever, is interesting. Shipley in England published early 
papers and a book entitled " The Minor Horrors of War," in which 
everything that was known up to that time about lice was mentioned. 
In France, Houlbert published a pamphlet covering the same ground, 
and the women of France made an enormous number of camphor 
sachets for the troops to carry next their skin in order to deter lice. In 
Germany, Haase, stationing himself near a camp of Russian prisoners 
where living material was, to say tlie least, abundant, made, with 
that infinite attention to detail characteristic of the Germans, a care- 
ful study of the body louse, and published a sizable book giving the 
results of his investigations. Attention to important details is ad- 
mirable, but when a writer devotes several illustrations and a minute 
description to the method by which a louse, accidentally finding itself 
on its back, resumes its normal position with the back upward, as 
Haase did, the practical reader is inclined to smile. 
Later, however, much practical work was done by all these nations. 
Delousing stations were established; an admirable investigation of 
all aspects of the subject was carried on by Nuttall at the Quick 
Laboratories in Cambridge, England, and conditions were much im- 
proved before the United States troops began to mass and to be 
shipped across the Atlantic. 
