Farm Spies: How the Boys Investigated Field Crop Insects

Abstract

THIS is a collection of brightly written, well-illustrated “story-articles “on various common injurious insects of North America, designed to catch the attention and enlist the sympathies of “boys and girls and those persons who know nothing about insects and how to fight them.” Among the pests described are the cotton boll-weevil and root-louse, chinch-bugs (an American that is really a “bug”), grasshoppers, and the black corn weevil. The life-histories and habits of the insects are drawn out by conversations between farmers and entomologists, and the farmers' boys are naturally enlisted in the work of destroying the ravagers of crops. Points in the breeding and feeding habits that bear on farm practice are often cleverly emphasised, and some of our British students might he well occupied in compiling for the Home Country a somewhat similar work. “Nearly every incident mentioned has at some time or other come within the experience of the authors,” we are told in the preface. The qualification is satisfying when we read how “Dr. Science, walking across a field, heard a vetch plant and a bacterium talking together,” how he asked “Would it be possible for you two to get together and trade?” and how the vetch suggested: “The bacterium can live on my roots and supply me with nitrogen, and I furnish him with phosphoric acid and potash.” Happily such passages, which are neither good science nor good fiction, are rare in the handy little volume.

Farm Spies: How the Boys Investigated Field Crop Insects.

By Prof. A. F. Conradi W. A. Thomas. Pp. xi + 165. (New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1916.) Price 3s. net.