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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 liglited 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 debris 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 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 no,t have enabled the owners to have 

 saved them in the fall of 1897, yet the fall plowing of the land, possibly 

 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 

 included 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 case 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 harrowed 



[Cir. 113] 



