Here the young girl made her first collection of insects, and here she began her studies on the cause and nature of the parasitic attacks upon crops. Here she first realized the frightful ravages that were occasioned by the manifold insect pests that infest not only trees, shrubs, cereals and vegetables, but also flocks and herds as well. And here, too, she resolved to devote her life to devising preventive and remedial treatment for the evils which were robbing the husbandman of so great a part of the fruits of his toil.
After taking this generous resolution, the life of our young heroine was, like that of Liebig and Pasteur, devoted to the welfare of her fellowmen. And like these noble benefactors of their race, her thought was always how she might prevent the losses and increase the products of the tillers of the soil. Entomology with her was not mere nomenclature—a knowledge of strange and fantastic names, which, with the ignorant, constitutes a distinction—but one of the most practical and useful of the sciences.
Miss Ormerod might, had she so elected, have won fame as a systematic entomologist and as a distinguished contributor to the already long list of genera and species of insects. She might have devoted herself to theoretical work, or bent her energies towards the general advancement of the science, like Fabricius, Swammerdam, Westwood and Burnmeister; but she preferred to forego all the glory that might accrue from pursuing such a course, and to direct her efforts in such wise as to be of most service to humanity.
Like the great Pasteur, after his long and laborious experimental researches on silkworm diseases, Miss Ormerod could, at the end of her illustrious career, declare with truth: "The results which I have obtained are, perhaps, less brilliant than those which I might have anticipated from researches pursued in the field of pure science, but I have the satisfaction of having served my country in endeavoring, to the best of my ability, to discover the remedy for great misery. It is to the honor of a scientific man that he values discoveries which at their birth can only obtain the esteem of his equals, far above those which at once conquer the favor of the crowd by the immediate utility of their application; but, in the presence of misfortune, it is equally an honor to sacrifice everything in the endeavor to relieve it."[173]
Miss Ormerod's labors were not, it is true, instrumental in rescuing from destruction a nation's chief industries, as were Pasteur's in the case of his famous researches on the phyloxera of the grape vine or the pebrine of the silkworm. Nor had they to do with such frightful industrial disturbances as have frequently been occasioned by rinderpest or by the potato blight in Ireland in 1845.
This is true in so far as any one pest is concerned. But when one reflects on the scope of Miss Ormerod's investigations and considers how far-reaching were her researches and how many and diverse industries were embraced by the remedial and prophylactic measures which she proposed, one cannot but realize the immense importance of her life-work.
The fact that her activities were confined chiefly to old and well-known pests—insects from which the farmer and the gardener and the forester had suffered for centuries, and which they had come to regard as necessary and inevitable evils—does not detract from the merit and the value of her labors. That she should have taken up a work which affected so many people and have been so successful in abating, or in entirely removing evils which had so long afflicted agriculturists and stock-growers, shows that she was a woman of rare courage and determination as well as one of invincible persistence and of intellectual resources of a very high order.
During more than a quarter of a century Miss Ormerod devoted practically the whole of her time to the study of economic entomology and to spreading a knowledge of it among her countrymen. From 1877 to 1898 she published annual reports on injurious insects and sent them broadcast throughout Great Britain and her colonies. In addition to this she wrote a number of manuals and textbooks on insects injurious to food crops, forest trees, orchards and bush fruits.
Nor was this all. She also prepared for gratuitous distribution a large number of four-page leaflets on the most common farm pests. Of the leaflet, for instance, on the warble-fly, its life-history, methods of prevention and remedy, no less than a hundred and seventy thousand copies were printed. And so great was the demand for her leaflet on the gooseberry red spider that a single mail brought her an order for three thousand copies.
Miss Ormerod, it is proper to state here, received no remuneration whatever for her great services to the public. On the contrary, she gave not only all her time gratuitously, but bore a great part of the expense of printing and distributing her publications. The amount of good she thus did unaided and alone cannot be estimated.