﻿184 SEVENTH ANNUAL REPOKT 



the Appendix, most cultivated plants may be protected from the rava- 

 ges of these young by good cultivation and a constant stirring of the 

 soil. The young have an antipathy to a lose and friable surface, 

 which incommodes them and hinders their progress ; and they will 

 always leave such a surface for one more hard and firm. I say, there- 

 fore, to those in the districts where the locusts hatch out : get your 

 crops in early; employ some one or all of the means here indicated ; 

 get your neighbors to do the same ; but by all means cultivate thor- 

 ough]3^ Let the local granges take the matter in hand, an d by reso- 

 lution oblige united action among themselves, at least, by establish- 

 ing a fine or some other penalty, to be paid by any recusant and neg- 

 lectful members. If the means here enumerated are adopted in con- 

 cert over the more thickly settled portions of the threatened country, 

 as in our own western counties, prospective injury may be averted, 

 and the enemy be rendered comparatively harmless until the danger 

 is passed. Two or three month's energetic work will suffice. Determi- 

 nation perseverence and united action must be the watch-words* 

 With these, the people in the stricken counties will accomplish more 

 good than would have been accomplished by the $50,000 which the 

 Legislature refused them last winter. In the less thickly settled 

 parts no human agency is likely to affect the pest, and we can only 

 hope that Providence, by the different natural agencies known to be 

 fatal to it, may act where man is impotent. 



4th — The destruction of the winged insects when they swoop 

 down upon a country in prodigious swarms, is impossible. Man is 

 powerless before the mighty host. Special plants, or small tracts of 

 vegetation may be saved by perseveringly driving the insects off, or 

 keeping them off by means of smudges, as the locusts avoid smoke. 

 Great numbers may be caught and destroyed by bagging and crush- 

 ing as recommended for the new- fledged ; but as a rule the vast swarms 

 from the west will have everything their own way. Mr. Kelsey suc- 

 ceeded in saving many of his young forest trees in Kansas by 

 perseveringly smudging and smoking them. 



He gives his experience in the following words in the Kansas 

 JBarmur, Aug. 26, 1874 : 



At first we tried building tires on the ground, but it was not successful. The 

 smoke would not go where we wanted it to. We then tried taking a bunch of hay and 

 holdinir it between sticks, would fire it, and then, passing through the field on the 

 windward side, would hold it so that the smoke Avould strike the grasshoppers. We 

 would soon have a cloud of hoppers on the wing, and by following it up would, in a 

 short time, clear the field. We have thus far saved everything that was not destroyed 

 when we commenced fighting them, and while I do not give tliis as an infiiUible rem- 

 edy, not having tried it sufficiently, yet it does seem to me, from what I have seen of 

 it, that one good active man who would attend right to it could protect a twenty acre 

 field or a large orchard. But to be successful one must attend right to the business . 



