COLORADO POTATO-BEETLE. 75 



son ; and to see nrie you will henceforth need to make no distant 

 pilf>:rimage." 

 Here is a letter upon the other side of this question : 



Salina, Kansas. 

 Dr. W. LkBaron: 



Dear /Sir— Some time since you requested a report from those who experimented with 

 Paris-green. ^ Here is mine: 



The Colorado Potato-bug attacked my potato patch. I dusted the vinos with Paris. 

 green, mixed with twice its bulk of flour. The poison was applied in the morning wlien 

 the dew was on. I killed thousands of bugs — in fact the ground was really covered. I 

 could scrape them up by the handful. Many potato vines turned black and died. For 

 every bug that died a thousand seemed to come. They ate up all my potatoes and Paris- 

 green too. I dissent from the position that the bugs shun the presence of the Paris- 

 green; if so they would not eat it; and I found as many on the vines that I thoroughly 

 dusted as any. They ate them entirely up, stalks and all. L. P. 



Fighting against these voracious, prolific and many-brooded in- 

 sects is often, it must be confessed, very discouraging work, of 

 which the letter just quoted gives an example, and the following 

 case is another of a somewhat different character. One of my 

 townsmen, Mr. John llepworth, an industrious and careful farmer, 

 had nearly an acre of choice potatoes, which, by frequent hand- 

 picking he had preserved trom the insects till about the middle of 

 July, when, being driven with harvest work, he paid no farther 

 attention to them. Two weeks later I saw these vines and they 

 were half eaten up by the second brood of these loathsome Ter- 

 rain, and covered by them to such an extent that the owner aban- 

 doned them to their fate. A week later, Aug. 6, nothing but the 

 leafless stalks remained, and the insects, mostly in the larva state, 

 were leaving them and crawling in all directions in search for food. 

 In tills case most of the insects had come in from a neighboring 

 potato patch which had been neglected. No doubt hundreds, if 

 not thousands of similar cases have occurred throughout the coun. 

 try in the course of the past season. A timely use of the Paris- 

 green would have gone far to save the crop in such cases. But 

 where the potatoes have become worthless, either from necessity 

 or neglect, there is but one resort left to procure any return from 

 the land, and that is to plow it up in season to raise some one of 

 the rapidly maturing crops, such as buckwheat, turnips, or Hunga- 

 rian grass. 



The great objection to the use of Paris-green is its virulently 

 poisonous nature, which renders it liable to injure seriously and 



