30 SECOND ANNUAL RKPORT OF 



one side of n Held, hut wherever the fence is, it is a sure stop. — Proc. ' 

 ffl( w York F<irn<< r-S Club. 



Finally, when the Chinch Bugs are already in the field which itii 

 proposed to rescue from their clutches, Mr. Michael Hopps, of Lyons- 

 ville, Cook county, Illinois, says that he saved a piece of wheat by 

 sowing gas-lime broadcast over it, at the rate of six or seven bushels 

 to the acre; and that the effect was that the bugs immediately left 

 his field, and his crop was saved, while the wheat of his neighbors was 

 nearly ruined by them. He further states that "a neighbor had a 

 field of wheat adjoining his (Mr. Hopps's) cornfield, in which the bugs 

 worked badly. Thinking that, as soon as the wheat was cut, they 

 would emigrate to his corn, he dropped a handful of the gas-lime upon 

 each hill of corn, in the same manner as plaster is often dropped upon 

 corn in the East. The consequence was that the bugs did not attack 

 the corn in the least." — (Prairie Farmer.) 



But, if gas lime keeps off Chinch Bugs, which may or may not be 

 the case, it appears that coal-tar most certainly will not do so, as the 

 following experiment of Dr. Shimer's proves: 



May 26th, 1864. — I saturated some saw-dust with coal-tar, and 

 mixed some quick-lime among it, so that it might b6 in a good condi- 

 tion for handling, and sowed it thickly broadcast over a portion of my 

 wheat field, where the bugs were very numerous. 



May 27th-29th, 1864.— The bugs refuse to leave the part of the 

 field where I sowed the tarred saw-dust, so there is but little hope of 

 driving them from their once chosen grounds, by the seasonable ap- 

 plication of strong smelling drugs. 



I have known farmers to follow the plan of going through a wheat 

 field badly infested with Chinch Bugs, and with a sickle to cut, here 

 and there, small patches of the wheat which they threw on the ground 

 in the form of a loose irregular shock. The bugs would gather under 

 these cut stalks in great numbers from the standing grain, and could 

 then be destroyed either by crushing or by burning them with 

 straw. 



The above remedies are selected as the most likely to prove prac- 

 tically successful, from a mass floating round in the various Agricul- 

 tural Journals, some of them utterly absurd and irrational, and othen 

 of very doubtful use. As to the ridiculous proposal put forth in th« 

 Waukegan (Ills.) Gazette, in 1865, with a great flourish of trumpets, 

 by one D. H. Sherman of that town; namely, to destroy the Chinch 

 Bugs in the egg state by pickling all the seed wheat; it is sufficient 

 to observe that this insect never deposits its eggs upon the kernel of 

 the ripe wheat. Consequently, to attempt to kill Chinch Bug eggs, 

 by doctoring the seed wheat, would be pretty much. like trying to kill 

 the nits in a boy's head by applying a piece of sticking-plaster to his 

 great toe. In the old Practical Entomologist (I, p. 48), I showed that 

 there were no such eggs in the wheat kernel's, which Mr. Sherman 

 himself had sent me, and which he had supposed to be thus infested. 



