184 
Experience has led to forsaking the <>M form of record book, and almost all of our 
present notes are written or dictated upon uniform-sized sheets and temporarily tiled 
in small pigeon holes until the end of the season, when they may be either worked 
up into a report or special bulletin. The advantage of uniform slips forsuch records 
is probably apparent to all, and most original records relating to such matters can 
easily be filed alphabetically or subjectively in ordinary letter tiles. 
The correspondence of the office is a large one, and the proper handling of the 
accumulated letters is a serious problem. Heretofore all such correspondence has 
usually been filed alphabetically, except in case of some more important correspond- 
ents, where their letters have been kept in special boxes. We have recently sorted 
out the more important letters and tiled them topically, and we are inclined to 
believe that this will prove an important aid in conducting the correspondence, since 
it will enable a ready reference to all letters written regarding any special insect or 
topic. We are making a practice of retaining carbon copies of all letters written, 
and it is our plan to minute upon the original communication the subject, and to tile 
only the copy topically. This does away with the need of an index card for the pur- 
pose of finding any letter which may relate to a special topic; and the carbon copy, 
of course, shows the party to whom the letter was written, while the record upon 
the original gives the topic under which the reply is tiled. Only letters which 
have been in the office two or three months, or more, are tiled in this way; and the 
occasions when both communication and reply are necessary are so few that we 
believe this method gives the maximum benefit with a minimum expenditure of 
labor. 
Both of these papers were discussed at considerable length by W. Webb, A. D. 
Hopkins, W. E. Britton, F. L. Washburn, and others. 
J. B. Smith then read the following paper: 
Tite New Jeesey Ideal ix the Study and Report upon Injurious Ixsects. 
Probably everyone who enters upon a position like that of an entomologist to 
an experiment station has a more or less definite idea of what in required of him 
and an ideal toward which he strives. It may not be a very definite aim that lies 
in his mind, and he may not even be conscious that he is striving toward an ideal; 
nevertheless, consciously or unconsciously, there is a model. It may be uncon- 
sciously that of some teacher or of some preceding author; or, consciously, one 
fixed by his own belief in what is necessary or desirable. 
The writer of this paper began his work in the early days of experiment stations; 
not among the first by any means, and indeed not until he had rather severely crit- 
icised, in an editorial way, some of the bulletins that had been issued before an 
offer came to him from New Jersey. Having placed himself in the position of a 
critic, it was incumbent upon him to avoid those faults which had been found rep- 
rehensible. It was therefore consciously that I marked out for myself a guide line, 
to which T have adhered rather closely since 1889, amplifying, of course, to some 
extent and changing as experience dictated. I decided that my constituency wanted, 
first of all, practical information. I decided also that it would be a very good thing 
for them to know how the information was practical and why I made recommenda- 
tions. I would make my publications educational; there would be something that 
could be learned by anyone who chose to read them, and I would make them so 
that any man of reasonable intelligence could understand what I was trying to tell 
him and could see why I recommended a specific practice in preference to any other. 
I decided further that very few farmers or fruit growers cared very much about 
entomology or cared to become entomologists. It made very little difference to them 
whether an insect had one generic name or another, and they cared absolutely noth- 
ing whether the name that was given to it was the first ever proposed for the species 
or not. What they did want was some name by which to call an injurious insect so 
that they would know what they were talking about when they used that name, 
and would know to what I was referring when I wrote concerning that species. I 
made it a rule, therefore, although this is one of a somewhat later development, that 
when 1 once had used a scientific term or combination of terms for an injurious 
insect, that for my purposes this became the common name of the insect, and would 
be used as such, no matter what changes were made later on in the catalogues. Of 
course, if the inject has an English name, it does not make so much difference what 
Latin name you tack on behind it. The farmer will very rarely commit it to mem- 
ory, and it will not make any difference to him how frequently you change it; but 
when he has learned to know a species as Pentttict misdlct, he does not know what 1 
am talking about when I refer to it as Smilia in another place, and he is altogether 
at sea when a third time I call it Eusmilia or something else. 
Classification is not necessary, except in so far as a knowledge <>f classification 
