126 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.84 



to do damage at points farther east, and from Matamoras had crossed 

 the Rio Grande at Brownsville. It must have been in the Brownsville 

 region before 1894, but north of this point there was a large area in 

 which there was no cotton. Evidently, however, cotton had been car- 

 ried, for ginning, north to Alice, and thus the insect became estab- 

 lished in the good cotton region about Alice, San Diego, and Corpus 

 Christi. Mr. Townsend reported that the damage to the crop during 

 1894 in this latter region amounted to from 75 to 90 per cent. The 

 remedies that he suggested included burning the fields, flooding where 

 tliis was possible, rotation of crops, picking and burning the bolls, 

 and turning cattle, hogs, etc., into the cotton fields. He especially rec- 

 ommended the abandoning of cotton throughout a wide strip of 

 country along the Texas border. He showed that a fifty -mile non- 

 cotton zone would protect the United States, and gave it as his opin- 

 ion that crops more valuable by far than cotton could be raised in the 

 territory. 



The following year the insect spread further. Mr. Townsend was 

 in the field and was joined by E. A. Schwarz and later by the writer ; 

 and by the close of the year the weevil had been found as far north 

 as San Antonio and as far east as Wharton. Texas had become seri- 

 ously alarmed. The then Governor of the State (Charles A. Culber- 

 son, later for many years United States Senator) visited Washington 

 the following winter. He was an old friend of Dr. C. W. Dabney, at 

 that time Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. The writer was called 

 into consultation, and the Governor was strongly urged to forward 

 legislation by the State of Texas establishing an antipest law and cre- 

 ating a non-cotton zone for the protection of the rest of the State and 

 the rest of the cotton belt — a law, in fact, comparable in many respects 

 to the State pest law of California which was the first State law of 

 this kind to be adopted. The plan met with the Governor's approval, 

 the bill was drafted and presented to the Texas State legislature, but 

 it failed to pass, and it seems safe to say that the responsibility for 

 the enormous loss which followed lies at the door of that particu- 

 lar legislature. 



The spread of the insect continued. Mr. Townsend continued his 

 investigations.^ A State convention was held at Victoria, Texas, and 



' In April, 1896, Dr. Alarlatt, in the course of a general trip of inspection to 

 the Southwest, including California, spent a week studying the boll weevil 

 situation in southern Texas, and, in cooperation with Judge Borden, conducted 

 some tests with arsenical sprays. These tests demonstrated clearly that the 

 early-appearing weevils fed readily on volunteer cotton, piercing the leaves with 

 minute holes, and could be easily killed by an arsenical application. The pos- 

 sibility of thus destroying overwintered weevils on volunteer cotton prior to 



