i PARASITIC FUNGI. 51 
FIRST FIELD APPLICATIONS OF FUNGOUS ENEMIES OF THE CHINCH BUG. 
As has been stated, the credit for first confining healthy chinch bugs 
with those diseased and utilizing the individuals thus infected by 
transporting them to sections of the country supposedly free from the 
disease in order to create new areas of infection, belongs to Prof. 
F. H. Snow. During October, 1888, the year prior to that during 
which Professor Snow began his experiments, Prof. Otto Lugger, 
of Minnesota, collected a quantity of diseased chinch bugs at the 
experiment station at St. Anthony Park and distributed them to 
eighteen different localities in the southern part of the State where 
the pest was known to occur in destructive abundance. The diseased 
material was sent out in tin boxes by mail, and the contents of the 
boxes, on arrival at their destination, were simply thrown in any 
field where there was an abundance of chinch bugs. Later in the 
season the condition of affairs where these distributions had been 
made was such that “ careful search in the majority of places failed 
to produce a single living specimen, while the traces of the disease 
were found everywhere.” With a spirit of caution and exactness 
in every way most commendable on the part of Professor Lugger, 
he says: “The disease spread so rapidly that even corn growing 
near wheat fields crowded with chinch bugs was entirely protected, 
and no bugs had entered it in all the places visited by myself. But 
the writer is by no means satisfied that the disease was really intro- 
duced in this manner. Is it not possible that the disease was already 
there, unknown to anyone, and that the writer had simply reintro- 
duced its germs? The reason for this belief is based upon the fact 
that too large an area was infested by the disease—too large to be 
readily accounted for by the short time in which the atmospheric 
conditions were apparently in its favor.” 
In this case Professor Lugger states that both Entomophthora and 
Sporotrichum were present and the latter was sent by him to Pro- 
fessor Forbes, so there is the same confusion of the two fungi in this 
case that existed in the writer’s experiments-in Indiana, except that in 
the one case it was certain that Entomophthora was present, while in 
the other it was the Sporotrichum. 
THE WORK OF PROFESSOR SNOW IN KANSAS. 
Although Professor Snow had the experience and observations of 
Shimer, Forbes, and Lugger to aid him in his first efforts to apply 
the knowledge gained by these gentlemen, yet it must be said that it 
has been largely due to his untiring energy and perseverance that the 
use of these fungi has reached the present state of importance. It 
will hardly be saying too much if we state that his persistent un- 
a University of Minnesota Experiment Sta., Bul. 4, Oct., 1888, pp. 40-41. 
