the otlier species, CarpopUlus mutilatus, equally magnified. 

 Both of these beetles are well known among fruit growers 

 in the Southern States, Mexico, and Central and South 

 America. They are widely distributed throughout the south, 

 feeding both in the larval and adult condition upon decay- 

 ing or injured fruit of all kinds, and are sometimes found 

 sucking the sap from wounded portions of trees. They are 

 common in cotton-bolls that have been injured by the boll- 

 worm, and in decaying heaps of cotton seed. Neither the 

 adult beetles nor the larva3 are known to eat or attack 

 healthy fruit or living vegetable tissue. The presence of 

 these insects, then, in the diseased and decaying cotton-bolls 

 is not surprising, and their presence can have at least only 

 a secondary connection with the true disease in that they 

 may, by their burrows cause, perhaps, a more rapid spread- 

 ing of the disease. 



Neither the beetles nor their larvae wer.e to be found in 

 all the disease cotton-bolls, but only in such as were greatly 

 damaged by the disease having spread so as to involve nearly 

 the entire contents of the boll and to have caused the tips 

 of the corpels to open slightly. In such bolls I also ob- 

 served several species of ordinary saprophytic fungi, and 

 in a few cases the fungus, Colletotrichum Gossypii, South- 

 worth, that produces the disease in cotton-bolls known as 

 authracnose.* But no fungi were observed in the bolls that 

 were only slightly diseased or decayed inside. 



The presence of fungi and insects in those cotton-bolls 

 only that were greatly diseased and decayed inside, and that 

 had either the tips of the carpels opened or the disease had 

 spread so as to involve a portion of the outer surface of the 

 bolls, together with the entire absence of insects and fungi 

 in all cases where the disease was confined to the contents 

 of the boll, led me to suspect the bacterial nature of the 

 disease in question. Accordingly, pure cultures of the bac- 

 teria from the disease inside the closed cotton-bolls were 

 then made by the usual plate culture method, and the inoc- 

 ulations made in both tubes of nutrient gelatine and of agar- 



*See Bull. No. 41, On Some Diseases of Cotton, by G. F. Atkinson, 

 p. 40. 



