36 
INTRODUCTION. 
be isolated or ants will carry it off ; flour must be in a tightly-closed tin, 
or moth, weevil or beetle gets in ; no sweet thing is safe, once opened, 
unless isolated on water, dried fruits of every kind are spoilt by beetles, 
grain is eaten by weevils; pulse of all kinds harbours moths or beetles ; 
even tobacco and dried drugs are not exempt. Daily and hourly mankind 
is fighting the ravages of the insect world, which seeks to take from him 
his last ultimate asset, his stock of food. Think of the countless sealed 
mud grain-stores there are in India, many in every village, and all because 
of the insect life around us. 
Let us take another aspect, that of disease ; malaria, enteric, 
typhoid, yellow fever, plague, filariasis and elephantiasis, sleeping 
sickness (? kala azar, black water fever), each and every one of these 
means a yearly total of deaths, premature and unnecessary, caused by 
the agency of insects. Think of the enormous total of deaths from 
plague in India, since plague came into India little more than a decade 
ago ; think of the desolation caused by sleeping sickness in Africa, of the 
countless cases of malaria in the tropics, of the extraordinary mortality 
from yellow fever, in old days, in the West Indies ; go to the West 
Indies and see the numerous cases of. elephantiasis ; men with legs like 
trees, men suffering from fever and ague for years which finally leaves 
them possessed of an elephant’s leg or arm ; think of the death-roll 
from enteric ! And after all this we may dimly realise the important 
part the insignificant insect world around us plays in our lives. 
This may be equalled by that part played by insects in inducing 
disease among our domestic animals. This is a purely artificial case 
largely brought about both by our careless transfer of stock from one 
part of the world to another and by our own reckless disregard of the 
rudiments of science and of all reasonable precautions. Think again 
of the agriculturist and his foes ; of the locusts which lay waste a 
district, of the bollworm that takes a tenth of the cotton-crop in India, 
or perhaps three-quarters of it in an occasional year ; of the mothborer 
that kills one cane-shoot in three ; of the rice hi spa that causes famine 
or the rice grasshopper that destroys the paddy over a whole division : 
think of the trials of new and promising crops abandoned in the past, 
because insects ruined every plant on a small plot. Why does not 
tree cotton grow successfully in India, or improved American maize ; 
why has no fruit industry been established in places where fruit 
