FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



our country, and this was used by us as one o£ the arguments in 

 favor of the passage of a plant quarantine law. 



In that year, therefore, I visited the great nursery-growing 

 regions in France, and found that it was a season of unusual 

 abundance of both these insects. The road-side oaks and hedges 

 in Brittany and Normandy were defoliated by the Gipsy Moth, 

 and the fruit trees and forest trees carried many nests of the 

 Brown-tail. In fact, caterpillars of many kinds were unusually 

 abundant. It is worthy of mention that a year later, 1910, exactly 

 the opposite conditions were found : caterpillars of all kinds were 

 scarce, no Gipsy Moth caterpillars were found, and very few 

 Brown-tail. 



In the course of my 1910 trip I hunted up M. G. Fermaud, the 

 agent of the Franco-American Seedling Company of Geneva, 

 New York and Angers. I had met him the previous year, and 

 had found to my surprise that he had hved long in America and 

 had married an American girl as his first wife, so that his 

 children by this wife, then nearly grown, were practically Ameri- 

 can. As agent for his company, M. Fermaud was growing nursery 

 stock in many different small lots in the country around Angers. 

 In order to show the clean condition of the stock in the field, he 

 took me to one place after another where farmers or agents were 

 growing young apples and other fruit stock for subsequent ship- 

 ment by his company to America. 



At one place in the suburbs of the city of Angers we stopped 

 at a gate in a high stone wall, which reached nearly to the tops 

 of the small stone buildings within and near by, and he said to 

 me, "Here is one of the men who is growing stock for me, and 

 who, by the way, is one of the most successful flower growers 

 in France, making a specialty, perhaps, of roses." We entered, 

 and found ourselves in a perfect paradise of flowers. Row after 

 row of magnificent rose-bushes of different varieties, many of 



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