BULLETIN XO. 82, MARCH, 1S95. 



91 



the Division at Los Angeles and who had discovered and developed this 

 •gas treatment, was fortnnately with me in Washington at the time, so 

 that the treatment was entrnsted to him. A¥e had some difficulty, in the 

 first place, in getting the tents manufactured, and still further difficulty 

 in ])utting them in operation. There are various contrivances in California 

 used for the operation of these tents, the simplest of which, perhaps, for aver- 

 age sized or small trees, are poles with which the two ends of a quadrangular 

 tent are thrown over the tree, the tree itself supporting the sheet. \n 

 the Charlottesville case the tents were constructed of eight ounce duck 

 and made in the form of an octagonal sheet, and were oiled with boiled 

 linseed oil, two of them measuring twenty-eight and the other two forty- 

 four feet in diameter. The fumigation was subsequently reported to 

 have been successful in destroying the insect without injuring the trees, 

 though some of these had already begun to leaf out or were in blossom. 

 Later developments, however, showed that a few of the insects had escaped 

 death just as I had found to be the case in the gas ti-eatment at Mont- 

 serrat. 



During the period when the experiments were being made, or during 

 March and April, 1894, fate had decreed that I should l)e absent in the 

 AW'st Iiulies. After making all due arrangements to have the work of ex- 

 termination thoroughly prosecu- 

 ted, aiul after having finished my 

 Annual Report to the Department 

 in which an illustrated article 

 upon this San Jose Scale was in- 

 cluded, I suddenly decided to 

 nuike a trip to the West Indies, 

 more particularly to study two 

 scale-insects, viz., the Purple Scale 

 {Mytilaspis citricola) and the Oi'- 

 ange Scale {Chionaspis citri) which 

 under the denomination of 

 "blights," had been for some years 

 killing out not only acres, but 

 S(|uare miles of limes on the Is- 

 land of Montserrat. This trip 

 was taken at the earnest solicita- 

 tion of the Montserrat Company, 

 of Birmingham, England, without any cost to the Department of Agii- 

 culture and without any remuneration to myself. 'J'he importance of the 



Fig. 2.— San Jose Scale; Api)le IJrancli, with 

 scales in situ-natural size, (from 

 Insect Lif(\ 



