18 SIXTH ANNUAL REPORT 



Some of the Northern States have been sufficiently wise and pro- 

 vident to appoint officers whose duty it is to study these insect pests, 

 and suggest remedies for their ravages; but in the South, no such offi- 

 cers yet exist. You are, in consequence, entirely at the mercy of this 

 apparently insignificant worm; and it is a matter of surprise that, 

 where the losses are so heavy, some efforts have not been made to 

 get the mastery over the pest by delegating some individual or com- 

 mission to make thorough investigations and experiments upon it. 

 Up to the present time, no really practicable remedy has been discov- 

 ered. Hand-picking is not wholesale enough. Fires, lights and traps 

 containing attractive but poisonous sweets, together with all other 

 devices, intended to allure and destroy the parent moths, are of little 

 use except where they can be generally employed throughout whole 

 districts — and this implies an amount of intelligence, organization and 

 unity of purpose, rarely, if ever, found in any community. Carbolic 

 soap has failed to fulfil the hopes and prophecies of its advocates. 

 Now, it has never been my fortune to experiment in a cotton field, but 

 from my experience with insecticides in other fields, I feel quite 

 assured that by a proper use of Paris green, the Cotton- worm may be 

 mastered. 



In the so-called Northwestern States, as you are doubtless aware, 

 we have been sorely troubled, during the past decade, by the Colo- 

 rado Potato-beetle {Doryphora lO-lineata,) an insect which affects 

 the potato very much in the same way as the Cotton-worm affects the 

 cotton plant; but from which it is not likely that you of the South 

 will ever suffer. We manage to subdue and defy it by a proper use 

 of the mineral mentioned, and from my experiments upon other leaf- 

 devouring worms, many of them belonging to the same family as your 

 Cotton-worm, I am satisfied that this last will succumb to the mixture 

 I propose, even more readily than does the Potato-beetle. * * * 

 Believing firmly that in this mixture we have a cheap and available 

 antidote to the Cotton-worm plague, I am anxious to give the sugges- 

 tion as wide a circulation as possible, in order that it may be thor- 

 oughly tried and reported on the coming summer. 



This means of appealing to the cotton-growers of the country had 

 the desired effect. The essay, giving directions for the proper use of 

 the poison, together with the natural history of the worm, was pub- 

 lished, either entire or in abstract, in a large number of the agricul- 

 tural journals which circulate in the South. The remedy was, in conse- 

 quence, very thoroughly tried and generally used, its merits being so 

 fully discussed that I received over a hundred articles on the subject 

 which Mr. C. C. Langdon, editor of the Rural Alahamicvji^ kindly 

 clipped for me from his exchanges. Later in the season, Avhen experi- 

 ence had settled many important points as to the effect of Paris green 

 on the Cotton- worm and the best mode of using it, the Department of 

 Agriculture sent out a circular to its cotton-growing correspondents; 

 which circular, with numerous answers, many of which are so indefinite 

 in point of detail, as to be of no value, or to convey wrong impressions, 

 and all of which lack signature and date, was published in the monthly 

 Department Report for November and December, 1873. The general 



