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Suggestions for the construction of store-houses and particularly of 
wood from which they should be built are made. Teak-wood is recom- 
mended and bamboo should be avoided. 
WORK OF THE GYPSY MOTH COMMISSION IN 1893. 
The report of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture on the 
work of extermination of the Gypsy Moth for 1893 has just been 
received. It comprises the report of the committee of the Board 
in charge of the work, the report of the director of field work, and the 
report of the entomological adviser, Prof. C. H. Fernald. The legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts appropriated $100,000 for the campaign against 
this insect in 1893, which, with about $5,000 left from the appropriation 
of the previous year, gave a fund of $105,000 for the year’s work. Of 
this sum $75,927.46 was expended, the largest items being $56,874.33 
for wages of men and $10,047.78 for supplies, tools, and insecticides. 
For the year 1894 an appropriation of $165,000 is asked. These figures 
indicate the extent of the task which the State of Massachusetts has to 
perform, and the importance of performing it successfully is shown by 
Prof. Fernald’s estimate of $1,000,000 as the probable annual damage 
which the Gypsy Moth would do in Massachusetts alone if allowed to 
spread. 
The work has been directed mainly toward checking the spread of 
the insect over adjacent territory. In this the committee and its 
director of field work, Mr. E. H. Forbush, seem to have been fairly 
successful, a list of ten places being given from which the insect has 
apparently been exterminated, while a large number of near-by towns 
in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire have been carefully 
inspected. 
It is contended that the work still to be done demands even larger 
appropriations, and the list of towns still infested by the insect includes 
the city of Boston and twenty-one of the smaller suburban towns 
immediately around it. Some 12,000 acres of woodland are comprised 
within this territory. 
Spraying with arsenicals, according to Mr. Forbush’s report, was 
only partially effective, and such was the prejudice prevailing against 
this method in some of the infested towns that people frequently 
washed the trees and shrubbery with water from the garden hose, and 
so neutralized the effect of the spraying. Banding the trees with 
insect lime was also not thoroughly effective in preventing the caterpil- 
lars from ascending the trees, and while burlap bands afforded a 
means of assembling the insects, so that they could be easily killed, 
this method of trapping is completely successful only when the bands 
are visited every day—an impossibility with the means at command 
over so large a territory. Two means accomplished the object sought 
whenever they could be thoroughly applied. Fire can be used to 
destroy the eggs of the moth, to kill the caterpillars, or to starve them 
