﻿OP THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 43 



Mr. Alfred Gray, the enterprising Secretary of the Kansas State 

 Board of Agriculture, who has made a number of official inquiries, 

 gets substantially the same favorable reports as to the influence of flax. 



A similar influence is claimed for castor beans and even for buck- 

 wheat; and some years back Mr. Erwin, Agricultural editor of the 

 Fulton (Mo.,) MaiU informed me that, having once gotten a poor stand 

 of corn, he harrowed it and sowed to buckwheat. The Chinch Bug 

 almost destroyed the rest of his corn, but did not work on this piece. 

 The tendency of buckwheat to keep the ground moist may throw some 

 light on this experince. 



It has been recommended to sow with each 12 bushels of winter 

 wheat, one bushel of Winter rye; and with Spring wheat the same 

 proportion of Winter wheat — with the idea, I suppose, that the bug 

 prefers the young to the old plants. There is little harm in the methods 

 and they are worthy of further trial. 



There are a great many other proposed remedies that appear in 

 the columns of our agricultural journals each year — some of them 

 utterly absurd and founded on ignorance; others of doubtful utility, 

 because founded on isolated experience, where too often it is evident 

 that cause and effect have not been properly understood. It is need- 

 less to instance them. As to the ridiculous proposal put forth in the 

 Waukegan, His., Gazette in 1865, with a great blowing of trumpets, by 

 one D. H. Sherman, of that town, namely, to destroy the Chinch Bug 

 in the egg state by pickling all the seed wheat, it is sufficient to observe 

 that Ihis insect never deposits its eggs upon the kernel of the ripe 

 wheat. Consequently, to attempt to kill chinch bug eggs by doctor- 

 ing the seed wheat, would be pretty much like trying to kill the nits 

 in a boy's head by applying a piece of sticking plaster to his great 

 toe. In the old Practical Entomologist^ nine years ago, I showed 

 that there were no such eggs in the wheat kernels, which Mr Sherman 

 himself had sent me, and which he had supposed to be thus infested. 

 Of course the same remark applies to every other proposition to 

 destroy this insects' eggs by manipulating the seed — however bene- 

 ficial such measures may be as a means of invigorating the plants, 

 causing an early start, or preventing rust and smut. 



INJURIOUS TO STOCK. 



Accounts reached me from several sources, and were common in 

 the agricultural papers, of stock being injured when fed with corn 

 fodder badly infested with the bug; and I have no reason to doubt 

 that animals confine^ to corn-fodder in seasons when every corn-stalk 



