26 FARMERS’ BULLETIN 657. 
the proper care of the roadsides as well as the grading and macadamiz- 
ing of the roadbeds. 
There are at present so-called “weed laws” in many States, and, 
though more or less of a dead letter in some cases, these laws are 
steps in the proper direction. The time when insect pests will be 
looked upon, in the eye of the law, as so many public nuisances, 
and the harboring of them a corresponding crime, may be a long 
way off, but as it gradually draws nearer we shall come to learn 
that after all it is the rational view to take and will go far toward 
solving not only the chinch-bug problem, but many others of a 
similar nature. So far as the chinch bug is concerned, when we 
burn over the waste lands and accumulated rubbish about our 
farms in autumn or winter we are simply applying the same check 
that the dusky savage did when he lhghted 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 fitting it 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 both on the hibernating chinch bugs 
and on the grass roots of burning over the meadow lands in winter. 
There can be little doubt, however, 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 hiber- 
nating places for the long-winged form, will go far toward settling 
the chinch-bug problem in grasslands. 
As previously stated, the chief drawback in putting preventive 
measures in force is 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 fall plowing of the land, 
possibly early enough to have had the ground sown 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 
migration to other lands in the spring of 1898. A rotation of crops 
that would have included grass for not to exceed two successive 
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