Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/479

Rh is done; but because it was carried into fields not theretofore frequented by American entomologists. His labors on the fossil insects of America are unique, and his collection of material for further work is immense. Of his systematic papers on orthoptera and his accomplishments in other directions I will not speak at present.

All these men paved the way—they made the studies necessary to familiarize us with the insects round about us, and theirs is the labor that is not spectacular and whose apparent results are not of public interest: yet such work we must have as a foundation for what we consider the more practical side of the subject.

First among the economic entomologists of this country we must reckon whose work on the "Insects Injurious to Vegetation" is a classic and, like most of the classics, was a labor of love rather than a money-making proposition. The state of Massachusetts paid him $200 for that work. Since that time it has learnt to pay rather more highly for entomologists, and nowhere have insects done more injury nor have they anywhere demanded the expenditure of greater sums. Harris's work is not only intensely practical, but it is interesting and informing—as useful to the beginning collector and entomologist as to the agriculturist, and always accurate.

Quite a different sort of man was for a series of years entomologist to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, who wrote comparatively little, but used his pencil industriously; producing a perfectly enormous number of drawings of insects in all stages, and engraving them on plates from which only a very few impressions were taken. Unfortunately, Glover had almost no systematic knowledge of insects, and while he made excellent pictures of the specimens as they appeared to him, he had not the slightest idea as to the identity of the insects figured, nor did he preserve the originals.

of New York, was a man of different type. A hard worker and hard student, industrious, of course, he studied not only those species that his field work demonstrated to him as injurious, but their allies and neighbors, and with a sure glance he fixed upon certain of the hemipterous families as entitled to the special consideration of the economic worker. Dr. Fitch's reports as state entomologist initiated a work in that state which has not been abandoned since, and which has put it among the leaders in organizations for entomological work.

Meanwhile, in the middle west the ravages of insects had developed new needs and new workers, and Walsh, Riley and LeBaron, began to make themselves felt, and really to develop a science of economic entomology.

of Illinois, had a career much too short, and it terminated before he had more than shown his vigor and