Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1913-01-05
NATIONAL TOPLINERS

DR. LELAND OSSIAN HOWARD is the
- champion bug hunter, bug fighter, and
bug gazer of the world. Moreover, he makes
Ponce de Leon, who died searching for the
Fountain of Youth, look like peripatetic
and paralyzed prune, and convlnces you
| that Alexander Pope, who achieved fame by
writing somewhat stlted couplet warning
people away from the Pierian spring, had an
unnatural fear of fresh and refreshing water.
| Leland Ossian, when he is not at work,
amuses himself with the greatest two-handed
juggling performance known to the modern
stage, lifting big dippers from the fountain
with one hand and elevating large goblets OF
the Pierian with the other.
Briefly speaking, DR.. Howard is chief of
the Bureau of Entomology in the Depart
ment of Agriculture entomology being the
highbrow word that means bugs and bug
ology), and he IS the big bass horn OF that
band of Americans who, when they put on
all the foreign decorations and orders OF
knighthood that have been given to them,
weigh two hundred pounds above normal.
And don't forget this: His announcement
on Hymenoptera which includes anything
from an ant to an ichneumon, is standard
piece of work. Anybody who can kill OFT
the housefy, tell funny story, look human,
and write about Hymenoptera, deserves rich
/ Y,
decorations, degrees, sashes, inscriptions, tin
horns, and medals that the world has hung
across Leland Ossian's well developed and
pumplike chest.
| Everybody owes something to this inves-
tigator of insects He is the patron saint of
all those who wear thin stockings; for he is
an engine of death when he gets on the track
of mosquito. He is the big brother of the
farmer, because, in pursuing every insect
that can hurt a crop, he is as swift as
Rupert, relentless as an Indian, and patient
as a Spartan And, when he finds a parasite
or bug that will eat up and kill off the de-
structive bugs, he lets out yell OF JOY,
dresses himself up gOrgeously as a Christ
mas tree, rushes to his club, and beats the
whey out of anybody who dares to play him
a game of billiards. Every year the United
States government, famous nowadays for its
energetic economies, loosens up more than
six hundred thousand dollars to pay him
and his assistants to look through micro
scopes and fathom the innermost secrets OF
bug family life, or to travel through field
and forest to find out what harm or good IS
done by insects visible or invisible.
| 1t is his duty and delight to protect every
thing from nut to an orchid, from an orchid
| to an orchard from a cotton field to forest.
] Mention to him the pear thrips or the Ar
gentine ant, and he can tell you what time
it goes to bed and how many minutes it
lives Ask him about the white fly or the
cranberry insect, and, taking one long lin
gering slant through his microscope, he will
impart to you more about these small tribes
than all the Psychologists have ever learned
about Egypt by deciphering the animals,
annals and annotations on the walls of the
pyramids If farmer in Michigan tele
graphs him that a bug with sixteen legs is
biting a sugar beet on the root, he sends one
of his men to beat the bug that eats the
beet. If he learns that some strange and
Lilliputian invader is using blade of wheat
as a grapevine swing, he sends another agent
to sit up nights with the wheat. He is the
human bug-alarm system.
| In the eighteen years that he has held his
present position he has conquered the cod
ling moth and added ten million dollars to
the value of the apple crop Of this countryS
Whenever a gypsy moth hears him coming,
| the bug works up panic that would make
the flight of the Turks before the Bulgarians
look like a leisurcy stroll down summer
lane when the shadows begin to fall and the
cool of evening comes. He has fought the
white scale that made merry with the orange
and lemon orchards of California and every
week or two he declares war against a new