Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/686

668 of nature may be so unfolded and presented that the youth of America may be turned from the unprofitable, innutritious, and demoralizing food of fiction to the bread and water of a true life."

The facts, details, and technicalities of this science are too immensely numerous to be taught with any great degree of thoroughness, except to such as make a life-specialty of the study. Yet a knowledge of its most interesting and important facts, principles, and methods, unencumbered with a strict scientific nomenclature, can be so quickly imparted as to bring it within temporal possibilities.

All educational institutions, and public schools especially, should be required to teach vertebrate and entomological zoölogy in a thorough manner, while the general characteristics of the other branches and a few of their more common and curious representatives should be briefly studied in addition.

The only way to bring practical entomology to agricultural minds generally, to the class with whom it is of greatest importance, is to require that it be taught in all public schools. It is a kind of knowledge which the young country student grasps easily and successfully when deprived of its unessential technicalities. Of such practical consequence is it, that it had better be taught at the expense of almost any other study of the usual courses, and some attention to it would be a great relief from unnecessary problems in abstractions which are often inflicted to a useless extent in early training.

It is a sad result of the failure to teach natural science in the public schools that our cultivators do not recognize their own interest and duty with reference to insects, and need to be forced by law to a sense of its importance, even when they appear as a great scourge and leave famine in their trail. Entomological legislation with respect to the locust plague in the West, like the German insect-laws ("Abraupgesetzen"), has been to a considerable extent beneficial, though it is often difficult to force the execution of such laws. There are strong reasons why we should have a set of insect-laws for all the States. They would be as useful and as easily enforced as the "game-laws," and those prohibiting the harboring of certain noxious plants, or of nuisances against which boards of health are organized. Only by some such arrangement can farmers be compelled to coöperate for their own interests and successfully combat the thieves which are robbing them of their produce, for there are plenty whose sense of obligation can only be aroused through government influence, and who will not educate themselves in this subject unless forced to it. Laws, even if not executed successfully, instruct the people as to their duties. We need legislation to enforce—1. The teaching of entomology and vertebrate zoölogy. 2. Coöperation in destroying insect-pests. 3. The protection of beneficial insects. 4. The protection of useful birds and their eggs, whether game-birds or not, throughout the entire year.

Where can the schools and teachers get the incentives and helps