53 



of attack, does not fill him with terror as do the suddenness and mag- 

 nitude of the attack in the latter case. 



In an article of mine, recently published in the Prairie Farmer, I 

 stated that the farmers, after a few years' experience with these in- 

 sects, generally learn all the means of local defense possible ; and, as 

 a general rule, the entomologist must learn these, not from any scien- 

 tific knowledge of the insect, but from the practical experiments 

 made by the farmer. All modes of attack and defense which in any 

 way depend upon the knowledge of the habits of the insect which 

 are not patent to the unscientific eye, the entomologist is expected to 

 to perceive sooner than those who are not entomologists. 



Although the farmer does not feel himself so helpless before the hatch- 

 ing brood as he does before the migratory hordes, yet he does not feel 

 able entirely to control them, even after long experience, is shown 

 by the following extracts from a letter sent me this season by a Ne- 

 braska farmer who has had some practical experience in the matter : 



" lam a hard-working farmer, 46 years old; came to Nebraska in 

 1855; have a good farm, and seven children, and would be getting 

 along very well if the grasshoppers would let me alone. They are 

 getting worse, and we cannot stand it much longer. I only got five 

 bushels of corn to the acre last year, yet I had to help others, and 

 now we have millions of ' hoppers ' again. Plowing, rolling and burn- 

 ing does but little good. * * Wise men say there is a parasite on 

 them. Well, we know something of the 'hoppers' and the parasite, on 

 and it never kills many of them, nor any of them until they are 

 nearly grown. But the birds eat millions of them before they are 

 larger than a grain of wheat. The small grasshoppers are too quick 

 for domestic fowls, but they get some of them when they are small, 

 and many of the larger ones. I think the birds have eaten half of 

 those hatched on my farm, but they are getting too large for them 

 (Date, June 1, 1875.) The farmers will all tell you the birds eat them 

 but they have killed many of the birds." 



First, the destruction of the eggs deposited. In thickly settled 

 counties, where labor is cheap, and there are large landed estates, as 

 France and Italy, it may be possible to do this somewhat effectually, 

 and it will effect something even in our border States ; but when the 

 invasion is general, and the eggs are deposited over a large area, 

 what can the farmers do toward destroying them, not only on their 

 farms, but also in the much larger area surrounding them ? 



The following, from a French newspaper in 1841, will give some 

 idea of the work of collecting grasshoppers in . Southern Europe : 

 " Such immense quantities of locusts have appeared this year in Spain 

 that they threaten in some places to entirely destroy the crops. At 

 Damiel, in the province of Cuidad-Real, three hundred persons are 

 constantly employed in collecting these destructive insects, and 

 though they destroy seventy or eighty sacks every day, they do pot 

 appear to diminish?' This number in the vicinity of a single city, 

 on a very limited area. 



As a practical test, let us take a county in Kansas, say Rice county, 

 which has an area of 720 square miles, and a population, according to 

 the last report of the Kansas Board of Agriculture, of 2,396, and a 

 voting population of about 260 or 275. Suppose eggs to have been 



