DESTROYING THE COTTON-MOTH. 163 



ing their farms, in making them more productive; but they 

 think they can do something toward checking the advance- 

 ment of that enemy that has proved so injurious to the South. 

 Men who have been opposed to everything like an inter- 

 change of opinion, through the press, in relation to farming, 

 and who have been ready to pronounce everything that is new, 

 either as a humbug or Utopian, are now busily engaged in 

 catching flies ; and it appears they will have no contentment 

 until the whole fly family is entirely exterminated. And pro- 

 bably it wUl not be uninteresting to some of your readers, if 

 not profitable, to give you the modus operandi how this thing 

 is done ; but as regards the effect that it will have, that is a 

 subject on which I am non-committal. 



We make a mixture of molasses and vinegar, and put it in 

 plates sufficiently deep to hold the flies after they are caught. 

 Some add a little cobalt ; but I don't know that they succeed 

 any better than the others. The plates are placed about over 

 the field, on stakes about the height of the cotton, with boards 

 nailed on their top ends, large enough to set the plates on. 

 The flies are attracted to those plates by the scent of the mix- 

 ture, and are entrapped. I have, with eighty plates, averaged 

 over 1,000 flies the night, and have taken as many as 45 and 

 50 from a plate in the morning, that were caught the previous 

 night. I have heard of some persons taking as many as 70 

 from a plate in the morning, that were caught the night before. 

 There ought to be one plate to each acre of cotton, though I 

 know of no one who has them so thick. 



Another way that some are attempting to destroy them, is 

 by striking them down with paddles, their whole force being 

 employed in that way mornings and evenings. If it is a fact 

 that the moth (which some doubt now, I believe,) deposits her 

 egg on the cotton, which makes the worm ; then it looks rea- 

 sonable that, by destroying the flies, the number of worms must 



