172 LANDRETH— THE NEW AGRICULTURE. [May 4 



burrow or ensconce themselves notably in the seeds of peas or beans, 

 corn or wheat. These grubs may be killed in their holes by the 

 fumes of carbon bisulphid, to effect which the seedsman erects a 

 room say thirty or forty feet square, lined top, bottom and sides with 

 tin and with a door which can be hermetically sealted. Such a 

 room can be loaded up with a carload, say six hundred bushels of 

 peas, beans or anything else. 



A carload of peas or beans thus treated and subjected to the 

 fumes from a gallon of the liquid for thirty hours may then be taken 

 out with all the larva killed, the fumes penetrating not only to the 

 center of the pile, but to the center of every sack. The odor of the 

 fumes soon dissipates, leaving no resultant injury to seed vitality nor 

 to edible properties of either seeds or food stuffs : A more efficient 

 agent is hydrocyanic acid gas, but it is dangerous in the hands of 

 ignorant people. 



About i860 the use of carbon bisulphid was introduced among 

 the vineyardists of France as an agent to arrest the ravages of the 

 phylloxera, a plant louse feeding on the roots of the grape-vine. 

 Possibly at this date 300,000 acres of vineyards are being annually 

 treated, a half ounce of a liquid being applied by injection to every 

 square foot of soil surface, the vapor filling all the soil interstices, the 

 application being two treatments of ten days apart. 



But an entirely new practice based upon scientific observations 

 and a rather amusing contribution of science to agriculture is the 

 introduction of cannibal bugs, sorts which do not injure vegetation, 

 but luxuriate on the meat of other species of bugs. Some of these 

 precious insects have been imported from China and are doing a fair 

 amount of work on the California coast, while certain imported Mex- 

 ican ants are very active in Texas cotton fields, feeding upon the 

 cotton boll worm and its eggs. Thus science, while going hand in 

 hand with agriculture, encourages cannibalism. 



The farmer again had to turn to scientists to learn how to arrest 

 the injuries from fungus diseases on his growing plants of grain, 

 vegetables and fruits, and there has grown up a large industry in 

 the manufacture of fungicides, principally copper compounds, which 

 are sprayed upon the plants the same as are the insecticides. In 



