PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOLL WEEVIL CONVENTION. 15 



gathered from a few trap plants left for this purpose. Upon this area 

 and on adjacent fields no cotton should be grown the following year, 

 in order to completely starve out any forms that may have escaped. 

 By the time that the infected area of Texas has reached the Louisiana 

 line on the west, we will have had time to have tested the merit of 

 the starving out method. If it should prove successful then the es- 

 tablishment of the new cotton-growing zone, which has been suggested, 

 would assuredly have much more to recommend it. There are many 

 objections to be raised to the establishment of a new cotton zone. 

 The expense, the difficulty of adjusting our present methods to other 

 crops to make them as profitable as cotton, the experimental stage of 

 the suggestion, all are significant objections were even the constitutionality 

 of the plan admitted. On the other hand this is possibly the 

 only method of stopping the invasion of the weevil that is at 

 all feasible. Should the barrier prove effective the South's money 

 crop would be saved, and the United States would remain the 

 chief cotton-producing country of the world. The high price 

 of cotton produced by the limited output, due to the ravages of 

 the weevil, will encourage other countries to embark in the growing of 

 cotton, with the result that we shall have the weevil, and in time only 

 an ordianry price for our expensive and limited product. The prospect 

 of organized labor, a decrease in the price of our lands, and a struggle 

 through a series of years to re-establish our agricultural prosperity is 

 certainly gloomy and uninviting. To make no effort to thwart such 

 a calamity would be criminal. 



It has been suggested that people indifferent as to the future, but 

 anxious to reap the immediate returns from a higher price of cotton, 

 would maliciously spread the weevil into uninfected fields. This might 

 be done, but we are reluctant to attribute to man traits that are platonic, 

 and to believe that devils incarnate are inhabitants of America in the 

 twentieth century. An important medium of scattering the weevil, and 

 one likely to be overlooked, is in people of Louisiana sending to Texas 

 for weevils in order to make comparisons with insects found in the 

 cotton fields here, or for the purpose of merely seeing what specimens 

 of the boll weevil are like. Unfortunately, in many cases live insects 

 are received, and there is considerable danger of specimens escaping. 

 Under no circumstances should live weevils be imported, either for ex- 

 amination or experimentation. 



TO RECAPITULATE: 



First It is important and essential that our preventive and remedial 

 actions should be based upon known facts concerning the life of the 

 weevil. 



Second Louisiana and Texas conditions, as regards plant growth 



