$8 
Thomas, already cited, both Paris green and tobacco water are said 
to be ineffectual; and here, for the first time, a remedy is suggested 
which has proven to be an easy and perfect method of controlling 
the ravages of this insect. ‘Where it will not pay,” he says, “to 
adopt this method, and the patch is badly infested, I am inclined 
to the opinion that burning will be the most effective remedy. 
Cover the plants with straw after the worms enter the pupa state 
in the fall, and burn over thoroughly. It is possible that rolling 
twice or thrice with a heavy roller may destroy most of them, but 
it is somewhat doubtful.” 
In the following year this method was tried at Normal, with the 
improvement of first mowing and then burning the field soon after 
the fruit was gathered. ‘This procedure was completely success- 
ful. The plants were not injured, but speedily sent up new, strong 
leaves, which made a dense growth by fall; and the plants the 
following year were but slightly injured by the insect. <A repetition 
of this treatment for two more years in succession reduced the leat- 
roller to complete imsignificance, and it has not since appeared in 
that region in injurious numbers. This remedy has also been else- 
where extensively employed, and it is now the standard method of 
fighting the leaf-roller. Mr. H. K. Vickroy, who has burned his 
fields over five or six times, informs me that his plants have never 
been damaged in the least by the process. He first mows the whole 
field over as close to the ground as he can cut with a mower, and 
leaves the cut weeds and foliage to dry a few days, so that it may 
burn readily. He then loosens and rakes up the straw mulching, 
sometimes spreading it hehtly over the rows, and fires the field in a 
gentle breeze. If he had no mulching on the field, he would sprinkle 
straw lightly over it. To test the endurance of the plants, he has 
piled straw a foot high on the rows, and burned it without the 
slightest injury to the strawberry plant. Itis possible, however, that 
elther during or immediately before a very dry time, the plants 
might be damaged by burning, In the first instance, they might 
burn too deeply; and in the second, the new leaves might be too 
slow to start. For Southern Illinois, until the life history of the 
insect in that latitude is complete, we can only say that the fields 
should be mowed and burned late in June or early in July. 
If there are any instances in which this remedy is not applicable, 
as where strawberries are raised upon the same ground with plants 
which would be injured by burning, no method of destroying this 
pest is known, unless it be by giving chickens access to the field in 
midsummer. Of this, Mr. Gibbs, of Minnesota, says: “My only 
hope of saving my crop next summer is in the services of numerous 
broods of chickens that I intend to scatter in coops set lere and 
there about the fields; and I indulge in this hope confidently, for 
the reason that a neighbor of mine across the road from my place 
had quite a large patch entirely free from the insects last summer, 
although his vines were grown from plants taken the previous year 
from my infested field. The only difference between his patch and 
my field was that he had a hundred or so of young chickens among 
his vines all the spring, while I had no feathered protection except 
from a few birds that had escaped ‘the slings and arrows of out- 
rageous fortune’ at the hands of our village boys.” 
