(To rue Enrroa or ens "Semetros."3
Sto,—In reading your correspondent's letter on " Destructive Inserts," while one fully realizes the great utility of the careful display of injurious insects and their metamorphoses at the British Museum. one also remarks that since the ravages of insects occur everywhere throughout the kingdom, " the number of cultivators to whom the museum is easily accessible" is minute indeed when compared with the thousands of farmers and gardeners who have never even heard of it. Agriculturists are just beginning fully to understand the tremendously important part played by insects in the vegetable world, and though a considerable amount of literature has been published on the subject, it seems to have more or less led to a wholesale campaign against insect friends and foes. Only too frequently the harassed gardener kills, so to speak, the goose that lays the golden eggs when he destroys the cocoons of ichneumon flies, vaguely imagining them to be the offsrpring of cabbage butterflies. I think this question of such vital import- ance, especially now, to agriculturists that no man should be con- sidered a competent gardener or farmer unless he can distinguish a wasp from a house fly or an apterous gall fly from an ant as easily as ho can tell the difference between a cucumber and a vege-
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