﻿38 SEVENTH ANNUAL REPOKT 



everywhere available, cheap remedy, that would give relief at this 

 critical period, is from the nature of the case, hardly to be hoped for. 

 Yet it is not an impossibility ; and if I could devote to the effort my 

 whole time for one single year, with the means to test on a large 

 scale, thoroughly and effectually, the many different methods that 

 suggest themselves to my mind — as the use of sulphate of copper or 

 of iron; of carbonic acid gas or of sulphuret of carbon — something 

 might come out of the list of possible remedies, and thousands of dol- 

 lars might be cheaply expended in the attempt where such large 

 interests are involved. Regarding the use of carbonic acid gas, it is 

 probable that it would destroy the bugs on a hill of corn, if thrown on 

 to them at a distance of not more than two feet ; but from experi- 

 ments which I made upon chinches with a Babcock extinguisher, I 

 am of the opinion that little can be expected from its use as thrown 

 from this machine. The gas escapes too rapidly to be of any great 

 practical service, and has no effect on the bugs when thrown in a jet 

 five feet long. 



Abstaining from the Cultivation of the Grains upon which 

 THE Insect feeds. — On the principle that it is better to save the labor 

 and seed than to lose both and the harvest withal, the idea of quitting 

 the culture of the cereals, and especially of Spring wheat and barley, 

 for a year or two, as a means of preventing the breeding of the in- 

 sect to any injurious extent, has often been considered and discussed. 

 There is some reason to believe that the abandonment, for a single 

 year, of barley and Spring wheat culture, over a sufficiently large ex- 

 tent of country — as, for instance, over a whole county — would cause 

 a sufficient reduction in the numbers of chinch bugs in such a 

 county, as to insure fair crops for two or three succeeding years ; and 

 such a course is well worth trying. It is to be feared, however, that 

 it will never be carried out in concert over a sufficiently extended 

 breadth of country ; 1st, because the farmer can never foretell the 

 character of the coming season, on which the increase or decrease of 

 the pest so largely depends, and will naturally hope for the best; 2d, 

 because if neither Spring nor Fall wheat, barley, oats, rye, Hungarian 

 grass, timothy nor corn were grown for one season in any given 

 county where there are wild prairie grasses, the Chinch Bug would yet 

 breed, though not so numerously. 



NATURAL ENEMIES. 



Practically we have not much to hope for from the natural enemies 

 of this bug; for they are neither numerous nor efficient enough to 



