100 YEARS AGO

The old view that insects, with all the lower animals, were created for man's benefit cannot reasonably be held at the present time, but it must, nevertheless, not be forgotten that there are very many beneficial as well as injurious insects. Dr L. O. Howard has recently summed up the good and bad qualities of insects so far as it is possible to do, and he finds that the insects of 116 families are beneficial, and the insects of 113 families are injurious, while those of 71 families are both beneficial and harmful or their functions have not been determined. The injurious insects are made up of 112 families which feed upon cultivated or useful plants, and one family the members of which are parasitic upon warm-blooded animals. Of the beneficial insects, those of 79 families are valuable as preying upon other insects, 32 families are of service as scavengers, two families as pollenisers, and three families as forming food for food fishes.

From Nature 4 May 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

In his monograph “Scientific Management” ⃛ Mr. G. Chelioti urges that the essence of management is the art of getting things done through the agency of other human beings, and that management itself is incapable of becoming a science. He regards science as the foundation and the provider of the tools of industry, and the technician as the primary servant of science in industry; but he points out that the technician cannot manage human beings by means of his technology and that the manager dealing with a technical problem becomes a technologist for the time being. In urging this clear separation of the two functions of dealing with human beings and with technical problems or machines, Mr. Chelioti maintains that the undue domination of industry in the nineteenth century by the new element of modern technology, and failure to regard industry as the servant of humanity and to consider sufficiently the human beings employed, was responsible for the revolt of the human spirit against subordination to the machine which we are still experiencing in spite of a more enlightened managerial outlook.

From Nature 7 May 1949.