278 INSECT PREVENTION. [Feb., 



any means keep the daddylong-legs from infesting pasture or ley in 

 the one autumn that we may be passing through, we shall, I believe 

 I may say, be secure from attacks of leather-jacket grubs on that 

 g)-ouud in the following spring. We know many of the common 

 measures of prevention very well, such as draining wet meadows, rough- 

 mowing neglected herbage, paring and burning, and other operations, 

 simple, or expensive and troublesome, as the case may be, but judging 

 from the widespread amount of attack in this past year, something more 

 is needed, and I wish to submit to you whetlier much the same treat- 

 ment which we know answers in lessening wireworm attack would 

 not be equally (or, very likely, still more) serviceable in lessening 

 attacks of daddy-longlegs grubs. The measures of feeding sheep on 

 land to be broken up would be useful in either case, as thus the parent 

 insects would be to a great extent driven oft', and many of the eggs 

 and grubs destroyed. But further, as the numerous eggs of the 

 daddy-longlegs, or Crane fly, as it is sometimes called, are stated to 

 be laid singly either as the insect is tlying or as it rests in herbage, and 

 therefore not in any greatly protected nook, wc might fairly expect to 

 get rid of nearly all of them liy destroying the herbage amongst which 

 they lie. Also, though we know that moisture, or even thoroughly 

 drenching the ground, does not hurt these leather-jacket grub.s, yet 

 it has been found that they might be killed by putting the infested 

 field under sewage water for a short time. It might therefore be 

 hoped that soddening in the wet surface caused by the presence of the 

 sheep would be hurtful to them. In the case of dressings with 

 salt, as we know that the leather-jacket has been found to go 

 deeper down in the ground according to the amount of salt placed on 

 the surface, we might expect the application to serve fully as well as 

 a preventive for the Crane fly setting up an attack in the autumn, as 

 wc know it to do in the case of wireworm. Heavy dressings of gas 

 lime on the land to be broken up would be as useful in all points, and 

 possibly more so in killing the grubs, as although they have a power 

 of going down in the ground, we have no knowledge that they can go 

 down as deeply out of the way of danger as the wireworms do. Hoi 

 lime also would be more eft'ective, as a dressing in brealving up land, 

 against these than against other insects, because both as fly and grub 

 the daddy-longlegs loves moisture, and the abstraction of this by the 

 lime would not suit it at all. This fact of the grubs disliking drought 

 is also brought to bear on them by such measures as thorough 

 scarifying, even without more care in collecting and burning the 

 rubbish than is given in regular agricultural course. Tlie Crane 

 flies propagate most in undisturhed as well as in damp land, and the 

 thorough crumbling of the upper surface (at which the grubs find their 

 food) lets in air so as to dry the ground into a condition unsuitable 



