132 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.84 



call his opponent a boll weevil. A prominent official of one State was 

 called " The greatest boll weevil the State of Mississippi ever pro- 

 duced." 



Doctor Hunter once t(jld nie that the boll weevil had figured in a 

 number of romantic tales, some of them dealing with the villainous 

 introduction of the insect for the purpose of wreaking vengeance 

 on a community. Of course the insect figured often in the news- 

 paper cartoons. One of the best of them ap^^eared in the News of 

 Greenville, South Carolina in 191 1. It showed a gigantic boll weevil 

 standing partly in Georgia and partly in Alabama, its shadow begin- 

 ning to strike South Carolina. In its hand it held a black flag with skull 

 and cross-bones, and the legend read " In the shadow of the pest." 



And it got into poetry and even into the only folk-song we have 

 in the United States — that of the negro. One of the longest and best 

 of these is a narrative work song recorded by Prof. Gates Thomas, 

 of the Southwestern Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, 

 in the Publications of the Texas Folk-Lore Society, No. 5 (1926), 

 pages 173 to 175. The two stanzas at the end of this song are as 

 follows : 



The boll-weevil sez to the farmer, " What make yo' neck so red ? " 

 " Tryin' to beat you devils ; it's a wonder I ain't dead ; 

 For you're takin' my home, Babe, just a-takin' my home ! " 



" Well ef you want to kill us, I'll sho-God tell yo' how : 

 Just bundle up yo' cotton sack and th'ow away j-o' plow; 

 Then hunt yo' a home, Babe, then hunt yo' a home." 



Note that the boll weevil itself makes practically the same recom- 

 mendation for its own extermination that Townsend made in his 

 original report in the winter of 1894-5 and which was urged upon the 

 Governor of Texas by Assistant Secretary Dabney and the writer. 



INSECTS AND DISEASE 



The last of the four striking discoveries of the last decade of the 

 last century which have been so instrumental in the promotion of 

 work in applied entomology was the demonstration by Ross in India 

 that certain mosquitoes carry malaria and that only through their 

 punctures do people get malaria. This was one of the most important, 

 far-reaching, and revolutionary discoveries ever made in the etiology 

 of disease. 



Althotigh Manson had previously proved the transmission of 

 filariasis by mosquitoes, and although Smith and Kilborn had flemon- 

 strated the carriage of the Texas fever of cattle by ticks, the insect 



