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THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
A CONCEPTION OF DR. HOWARD 
CHIEF OF BUREAU OF ENTOMOLOGY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
Dr. Leland Ossian Howard is the champion bug hunter, 
bug fighter, and bug gazer of the world. Moreover, he makes 
Ponce de Leon, who died searching for the Fountain of 
Youth, look like a peripatetic and paralyzed prune, and 
convinces you that Alexander Pope, who achieved fame by 
writing a somewhat stilted couplet warning people away 
from the Pierian spring, had an unnatural fear of fresh and 
refreshing water. Leland Ossian, when he is not at work, 
amuses himself with the greatest two-handed juggling 
performance known to the modern stage, lifting big dippers 
from the fountain with one hand and elevating large goblets 
of the Pierian with the other. 
Briefly speaking. Dr. Howard is chief of the Bureau of 
Entomology in the Department of Agriculture (entomology 
being the highbrow word that means bugs and bugology), 
and he is the big bass horn of that band of Americans who, 
when they put on all the foreign decorations and orders of 
knighthood that have been given to them, weigh two hundred 
pounds above normal. And don’t forget this: His pro¬ 
nouncement on Hymenoptera, which includes anything 
from an ant to an ichneumon, is a standard piece of work. 
Anybody who can kill off the housefly, tell a funny story, 
look human, and write about Hymenoptera, deserves richly, 
not to say prodigally, all the orders, decorations, degrees, 
sashes, inscriptions, tin horns, and medals that the world 
has hung across Leland Ossian’s well developed and pumplike 
chest. 
Everybody owes something to this investigator of insects. 
He is the patron saint of all those who wear thin stockings; 
for he is an engine of death when he gets on the track of a 
mosquito. He is the big brother of the farmer, because, in 
pursuing every insect that can hurt a crop, he is as swift as a 
Rupert, relentless as an Indian, and patient as a Spartan. 
And, when he finds a parasite or a bug that will eat up and 
kill off the destructive bugs, he lets out a yell of joy, dresses 
himself up gorgeously as a Christmas tree, rushes to his 
club, and beats the whey out of anybody who dares to play 
him a game of billiards. Every year the United States 
government, famous nowadays for its energetic economies, 
loosens up more than six hundred thousand dollars to pay 
him and his assistants to look through microscopes and 
fathom the innermost secrets of bug famhy life, or to travel 
through field and forest to find out what harm or good is 
done by insects visible or invisible. 
It is his duty and dehght to protect everything from a 
nut to an orchid, from an orchid to an orchard, from a cotton 
field to a forest. Mention to him the pear thrips or the 
Argentine ant, and he can tell you what time it goes to bed 
and how many minutes it lives. Ask him about the white 
fly or the cranberry insect, and, taking one long, lingering 
slant through his mciroscope, he will impart to you more 
about these small tribes than all the archeologists have ever 
learned about Egypt by deciphering the animals, annals, 
and annotations on the walls of the pyramids. If a farmer 
in Michigan telegraphs him that a bug with sixteen legs is 
biting a sugar beet on the root, he sends one of his men to 
beat the bug that eats the beet. If he learns that some 
strange and Lilliputian invader is using a blade of wheat as a 
grapevine swing, he sends another agent to sit up nights 
with the wheat. He is the human bug-alarm system. 
In the eighteen years that he has held his present position 
he has conquered the codling moth and added ten million 
dollars to the value of the apple crop of this country. When¬ 
ever a gipsy moth hears him coming, the bug works up a 
panic that would make the flight of the Turks before the 
Bulgarians look like a leisurely stroll down a summer lane 
when the shadows begin to fall and the cool of evening comes. 
He has fought the white scale that made merry with the 
orange and lemon orchards of California, and every week or 
two he declares war against a new kind of parasite that is 
injuring the forests—it being estimated that the bugs who 
go where the woodbine twineth do more damage to American 
timber than all the big forest fires throughout the country. 
On the other hand, if he hears of a beneficial parasite that 
lived in the hanging gardens of Babylon, or another that 
disports itself on the edge of the Zuyder Zee, he gags himself 
to keep himself from chattering his voluble enthusiasm, 
seizes a blank piece of paper, and orders a man across the 
ocean to bring back the parasitical and precious 
plunder. 
To indicate the doctor’s standing abroad, it may be well 
to remark that his book called “The House Fly—Disease 
Carrier,’’ has been reprinted in London and translated into 
Hungarian and Swedish, and that practically the only 
country that has not elected him a member of its leading 
agricultural or scientific society is Sarawak, whose inhabi¬ 
tants have heads as hard as the cocoanuts they export. 
Leland Ossian, in addition to being a crack shot at bil¬ 
liards, is a shark at bridge whist, a mighty man on the golf 
links, and a dreamer of the third degree when he hears good 
music. Furthermore, departing from the habits and habili¬ 
ments of science, he wears neither baggy trousers nor long 
hair.—James Hay, Jr. in Sunday Magazine. 
UNUSUAL WEATHER CONDITIONS IN CONNECTICUT 
Here at New Haven, Connecticut, we have had so far 
practically no freezing weather this year, and at the present 
time there is no frost whatsoever in the ground. Should 
this weather continue much longer buds of deciduous trees 
will be seriously injured. 
The Connecticut River has not been closed to navigation 
this year a condition not before known in its history. 
The Elm City Nursery Co. 
New Haven, Conn. 
“We think your journal is all O K and do not want to do without it.” 
Missouri. W. H. Roeder. 
