April, ’23] 
ENTOMOLOGICAL COURSES, DISCUSSION 
195 
of psychology in it as a result of which a requirement to do a certain 
thing or a requirement not to do a certain thing is always provocative in 
the human mind, of a desire to do the other. Even a Constitutional 
amendment has failed to overcome that, as we have evidence. 
Personally, after having had experience in teaching, both as a required 
subject and as an elective subject, the beginning entomology of a college 
course, I have reluctantly come to the opinion that in the long run all 
entomology in college should be elective. I realize that that involves 
certain undesirable features, but I am also of the belief that we gain in 
the long run more than we do by having all men required to take it. 
I will dismiss the first question with that answer. 
As to the second question, I will frankly say I don’t know. There are 
a few small things which can be done, and which I have done, with 
perhaps mediocre success. If I can carry the beginning students along 
to a point where I can bring in some egg clusters and have them hatch, 
before the students leave in the Spring, we can show them some of the 
changes which occur, and that is helpful. But when it comes to the 
vast number of our economic problems, which manifest themselves 
only during the summer months, the only solution I can see is in the 
form of summer courses. In some places these summer courses may be 
practicable but I am personally dealing quite largely with students who 
are obliged to put in a portion of the year in earning money with which 
to go on during the remainder of the year, and the summer months 
furnish them with that opportunity. It becomes therefore largely 
impracticable to require them to stay for summer courses; and while 
we have at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in theory a four term 
year or a four quarter year, the fourth quarter rarely has any subject 
offered in it, because of that reason, and I have not felt like pressing 
that matter. 
I think the real way of getting at it under such difficulties, therefore, 
is to arouse such an interest in the subject, while you have the students, 
that they will be keeping their eyes open after they go out during the 
summer; and it is my experience, that many of them will come back in 
the fall, not with an understanding of what they have seen, but an in¬ 
tense curiosity to have explained what they did see. And if you have 
gotten curiosity aroused, that is the first step, at least, toward the 
development of interest and a desire to go on. 
President J. G. Sanders: The third question is “How can the 
necessary laboratory work in the structure of insects, for example, be 
made definitely interesting to the average non-specializing student?” 
