millions of insects to be found on a single plant, and each hungry larva eats many times its own weight in a day. Every now and then the cry arises, "That which the palmer worm hath left hath the locust eaten; that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten." The locust and the grasshopper, the wheat midge and the Hessian fly, the chinch bug and the potato beetle, — there is almost no limit to the list, there are certainly no bounds to the numbers, there is no power in words to express their swift, silent, complete devastation. In the agriculture of the future, the insectary and its defences will play a prominent part.
 Insectary.
Preparing Caterpillars for Mounting. Upon entering the laboratory of the vegetable pathologist, one is impressed by the magnitude of the preparations and the inconspicuousness of the objects of investigation. In the library are heavy books and complete herbaria; in the sterilizing room, large ovens and a variety of instruments; in the culture room, what appear to be some pieces of mouldy bread under glass. The disproportion is only apparent. No one who has seen a field of potatoes yield to the "blight," their green leaves and plump tubers turned to a mass of putrefaction in a day; no one who has seen the sensitive corn develop in its tissues the cancerous "smut," bloating and blackening its snowy kernels until it seems to look piteously over its burden of corruption imploring help; no one who has watched the plum-tree and the cherry wrestling with the "black knot" until their fibres fill and swell like the veins of the Laocoön, can look upon the smallest spore of a fungus with indifference. For it has at last become a certainty that "blight" and "smut" and the "black knot" are due to the action of parasitic fungi, germinating and growing in conformity to fixed laws; and the seeming mould on the bread under the glass covers in the culture room came from the spores of these parasites sown on nutrient substances for purposes of experiment and investigation. In the case of the corn and of the potato, the germinating threads have mingled with the exhausted tissues of the host plant, and the black powder or the slimy mass is the result. The distortion and the swelling, as with the fruit trees infected by the black knot, are due to the attempt of the unhappy host to throw off the intruding organism. Small wonder is it, that in the fields and orchards thus dealt with men thought they saw a revelation of divine disfavor or devil's malice.
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