December, ’20] 
NEWELL: PRESIDENTIAL LETTER 
449 
more than $17,000,000 and the losses due to its ravages have exceeded this figure 
many fold. Its eradication is yet possible for the methods being used to prevent its 
spread are really eradicative in nature and have only to be employed upon a suffi¬ 
ciently extensive scale, with sufficient speed, to annihilate this pest in our country. 
In the southeastern United States the cattle tick has already been eradicated from 
approximately 460,000 square miles, an area equivalent to the combined territory 
embraced in the states of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, 
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The year 1924 will probably see its 
eradication completed. One is tempted to ask why this task, of tremendous economic 
moment to the South, was not taken up and executed by entomologists, instead of 
by veterinarians? 
The Federal Horticultural Board is now engaged, in the states of Texas and Louisi¬ 
ana, in a hand-to-hand struggle with the pink boll worm. Already approximately 
$1,400,000 of federal funds have been expended on the work of eradication and it is 
still far from complete. 
In Florida a plant disease, citrus canker, has been eradicated during the past five 
years, at a cost of $1,342,000. Large as this figure appears, its intelligent expenditure 
has nevertheless saved from destruction the citrus industry of Florida, which repre¬ 
sents an investment of $175,000,000 and which brought to the growers the past season 
not less than $43,000,000. This was not an entomological project in any sense of the 
word, though it happens that the work was under the direction of one who is an ento¬ 
mologist rather than a pathologist. It is mentioned here as an illustration of what 
can be accomplished and as an example which should be duplicated in the entomo¬ 
logical field with as little delay as possible. 
There are today under way in the United States no less than six campaigns to 
eradicate plant diseases. The efforts of the Federal Horticultural Board to eradicate 
the pink boll worm, of Florida to eradicate the banana root-borer, and of Mississippi 
and Florida to eradicate the sweet potato weevil, seem to make up the sum total of 
efforts along this line in the entomological field. 
Is it not time that we were “up and doing”? 
Very sincerely yours, 
Wilmon Newell, 
President. 
President A. L. Melander: The next paper by W. Dwight 
Pierce, on “ Commercial Entomology and the Service It Can Render 
to Organized Agriculture,” will be read by Secretary VanDyke. 
COMMERCIAL ENTOMOLOGY AND THE SERVICE IT CAN 
RENDER TO ORGANIZED AGRICULTURE 
By W. Dwight Pierce, Managing Director, Biological Department, The Mineral r 
Metal and By-Products Co., Denver, Col. 
Commercial entomology is such a new phase of economic entomology 
that it behooves us to give considerable attention to its possibilities,, 
its field, the type of service it can render, and the trend of the times 
which has made this new branch of our science possible. We are living 
in a period of seething change and readjustment! Effort is being cast 
into new channels. Old methods are being ruthlessly thrown aside. 
