100 YEARS AGO

Thirty years ago, a French entomologist, named Leopold Trouvelot, was living at Medford, in Massachusetts. He was engaged in carrying on a series of experiments on rearing moths⃛. He imported the Gipsy Moth, and by some accident, some of the insects escaped from his custody into his own or the neighbours' gardens⃛. Had prompt measures been taken, the insect might possibly have been exterminated; but it does not seem to have attracted any attention till about 1880, when the people then living in or near M. Trouvelot's former residence began to be troubled with swarms of caterpillars, though what they were, and whence they came, was then unknown. For several years the neighbouring houses suffered severely, apple- and pear-trees and shade-trees being stripped of their leaves and killed, and the caterpillars creeping all over and into the houses. Nevertheless, they spread very slowly along the street, and into surrounding woods till 1889, when the insects multiplied so much that the caterpillars stripped all the trees in the immediate neighbourhood of M. Trouvelot's old house, and then marched forth in armies sufficient to blacken the streets, in search of fresh provender. A terrible account of the ravages of the caterpillars is given by those who witnessed them.

From Nature 25 May 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

The numbers of university undergraduates, in the technical faculties especially, are today greater than ever before, and yet apprehension as to the true worth of university training was never so widespread as at the present time; for modern scholarship has made such strides, particularly in the field of science, that no one subject can be adequately studied without undue specialization and consequent neglect of other points of view. This danger of specialization was the theme of Mr. Oliver Stanley's recent address, on being installed as chancellor of the University of Liverpool, when he said that too many men and women today leave a university complete masters of a subject but still incomplete individuals, unable to act as evangelists of that broader culture, that more general philosophy which should be the university's gift to the people.

From Nature 28 May 1949.