REMEDIAL AND PREVENTIVE MEASURES. 71 
savage did when he lighted the prairie fires, though unwittingly and 
for an entirely different purpose. In the timothy meadows of the 
northeastern portion of the country, where, for lack of wings fitted 
for locomotion, the chinch bug does not so largely migrate to the 
waste lands in autumn, the problem is somewhat different, and it will 
require some careful experiments to determine the exact effects of 
burning over the meadow lands in winter, both on the hibernating 
chinch bugs and on the grass roots. There can be little doubt, how- 
ever, that a rapid rotation of crops, so as not to allow the short- 
winged form to become thoroughly established in a meadow, and the 
burning over of waste places, thus destroying such rubbish and 
débris as will serve to offer hibernating places for the long-winged 
form, will go far toward settling the chinch bug problem in grass 
lands. 
As previously stated, the chief drawback in putting preventive 
measures in force is in the difficulty of foretelling an invasion. In 
northeastern Ohio in 1897 hundreds of acres of timothy meadow 
were destroyed after the hay crop had been removed, but so late that 
the farmers did not suspect the true condition of their meadows until 
the spring of 1898, when the young grass failed to put forth and an 
examination revealed the fact that the roots had been killed, the 
abundance of chinch bugs pointing unerringly to the cause of the 
trouble, though in many cases a heavy crop of hay had been removed 
the previous year where now the ground was entirely bare. While 
in the case just cited a previous knowledge of the presence of chinch 
bugs in these meadows might not have enabled the owners to have 
saved them in the fall of 1897, yet the fall plowing of the land, possi- 
bly early enough to have sown the ground to fall wheat, would have 
buried the majority of the bugs so deeply in the soil as to have killed 
vast numbers of them and thus prevented their migrating to other 
lands in the spring of 1898. A rotation of crops that would have in- 
cluded grass for not to exceed two successive years, followed by wheat, 
would have amounted to precisely the same remedial measure as the 
one suggested. 
A ease in northeastern Ohio has come to the writer’s notice where 
an infested timothy meadow was plowed late in the fall of 1897. 
Late in April of 1898 this ground was cultivated, rolled, and har- 
rowed several times and most carefully and completely prepared for 
corn, which was planted, but with the result that a portion of the field 
was attacked and destroyed by chinch bugs, largely of the brachypter- 
ous or short-winged form. An examination about June 10 revealed 
the bugs in considerable numbers about the still remaining plants, but 
scattered over the field were more or less numerous clumps of timothy, 
in some cases apparently having been killed by the chinch bugs, while 
in others these were literally swarming about the dying but still 
