52 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



assure you I have been familiar with the work ever since its first 

 inception in Massachusetts under the old commission, and in 

 fact have been in close touch enough all along to know some- 

 thing of its history, and have had a lot to do with insect inva- 

 sions — enough to know something of what can be done with 

 an insect. Now there is one great advantage that we have with 

 this gypsy over all other insects — almost all other — and that is 

 the inability of the female moth to fly. I have watched them 

 by the thousands, and if we had a tree growing up one here and 

 one within two or three feet of it, a moth could not fly from one 

 trunk to the other — a female moth. I have watched them where 

 they tried even to climb up the tree they were on, and almost 

 invariably they would lose ground and get down to the bottom 

 and have to crawl away somewhere to lay the eggs. Now there 

 is the advantage. 



And what is our system of work in a few words? I will 

 explain it to you so I think you will see that there is hope. It 

 only needs the requisite number of the right kind of men, men 

 who are honest to the core and would not scatter an egg any 

 more than they would cut the finger ofif from their right hand. 

 Those egg clusters are laid in August, we will say. They 

 remain in that condition till the next spring. When they hatch 

 out, the little fellows are so small you couldn't see them as they 

 crawled up the tree — very small indeed. But by using what we 

 call tanglefoot, putting a strip around the tree of a sticky sub- 

 stance to intercept those little fellows, we can catch them by the 

 thousands as they go up in their first journey. After a little 

 they will begin to feed, only by night and hide away through the 

 daytime. That characteristic is in our favor, for in the infested 

 districts we burlap the trees ; that is, take a band of burlap 

 eight inches wide, put it around the tree, tie a string round the 

 center, turn the upper fold down, and we have a double fold 

 right round the tree. We will have to use burlap on every road 

 in the town of Eliot, and every road in the towns of York and 

 Kittery probably — what I mean every tree that comes near the 

 sides of the road where teams would pass, or the possibility of 

 their being conveyed by that means. Now as soon as the cater- 

 pillars come down the trees in the morning to hide away from 

 the sunlight, as they reach the burlap they crawl up under and 

 remain there through the day. A man is detailed for just as 



