54 REPORT ON THE FIG MOTH IN SMYRNA. 
vacuum machine, and the air extracted from the jar. (See Pl. XTV, 
fig. 1.) A day later the larve were alive and apparently healthy, 
but were quite inactive. On September 30 they were still alive and 
healthy, but seemed able to move only the fore part of the body, 
and that very feebly, spinning silk about them in apparent effort 
to make cocoons. When examined on October 8 they were in the 
same positions they had had a week previously; but by this time 
they showed almost no movement, at least no more than feeble 
agitation of the head, in evident discomfort. They had shrunken 
from their former size, and some had spun abundant silk; but none 
of them retained sufficient energy to spin a cocoon. They looked very 
sick, but were all living. By October 21 they were still more 
shrunken, and a few of them quite lifeless, though the majority 
showed by their color that they were not dead. 
From the experiment it is plain that larve, though they might 
survive, would not continue to feed and to do damage if the vacuum 
were sustained about them. The application of a vacuum treatment 
to figs in boxes, however, would prove quite useless, since the larve 
would immediately revive and become active when brought back into 
the air. To render the larve inactive and thus innocuous, the vacuum 
must be long sustained, which is possible only by putting all figs in 
glass jars—a very expensive process. 
RIDDING FIGS OF LARVZ BY STEAM, 
Experiments were made, October 6, to determine whether larve 
may be killed by subjection of infested figs to steam in confinement in 
a large steam disinfecting closet used in a Smyrna hospital for steril- 
izing clothing. The closet was tubular in form and horizontal, both 
ends opening to allow the entrance of one loading cage filled with 
clothing, while the other was being extracted at the opposite end for 
reloading. (See Pl. XV, figs. 1,2.) The loading cages ran on rails 
on frames at each end of the closet, adjustable to similar rails inside. 
The steam was applied from an adjoining boiler, the pressure being 
allowed to reach about 10 pounds, at which point the temperature of 
the steam was 115° C. (240° F.). 
A number of “natural” (dried) figs that showed traces of the 
presence of larvee within them was introduced into the centers of two 
25-pound jute bags of figs. The first bag was allowed to remain in 
the steam closet under full pressure of steam for 10 minutes, the 
second for 30 minutes. 
When the first bag of figs was examined following the steaming 
the larve were found dead in all infested figs within 3 inches of the 
surface of the bag. Of 18 larve taken from figs at or near the center 
