USE OF DESTRUCTIVE AGENTS. 399 



Sueur County, who is probably the best pructical authority in the State, 

 and he heartily indorses it, as you will see by his letter. The inventor 

 proposes to rush the manufacture of them extensively, and, all things, 

 considered, it seems worthy of notice." 



We requested Mr. Whitman, our special assistant in Minnesota, to 

 see the pan tried ; he did so, and found it to work well, though it ac- 

 complishes nothing more than the tar-pan, and, on account of being 

 more expensive at first co^t, was not so generally used. The pan has, 

 we believe, been patented, and can be built for $6. 



Under the present head may be mentioned the method that has been 

 and may be in future adopted, under peculiar and favorable circum- 

 stances, of driving the insects into streams and catching them, as they 

 float down, in sacks ; and, finally, the use of hand-nets, such as ento- 

 mologists ordinarily use in collecting and catching winged insects. This 

 method is strongly advocated by Ger- 

 stacker, Korte, and other European 

 writers, and may be employed with 

 advantage in a small way with us 

 where special crops are to be cleared 

 that would be injured by other 

 methods. A simple net, such as that ^ 



herewith illustrated (Fig. 105) may be ^,^_ io5.-ha:<d NEx-a, complete; &, hoiiow 

 cheaply constructed by any tinsmith -, ^^°^i^'- ^' ^^^* ^^''^™^- 



the only material required being a piece of stout wire, a hollow tin tube 

 in which to solder the two ends, and a piece of cotton or linen cloth, a 

 wooden handle of any desired length being inserted in the non-soldered 

 end of the tube. 



USE OF DESTRUCTIVE AOENTS. 



We have never had much' faith in the application to the plant cr the 

 insect of any chemical mixture, fluid, or powder, as a means of destroy- 

 ing the locusts : 1st, because nothing will more quickly or surely kill 

 them than coal-oil j 2d, because of the impracticability of using any such 

 application on the extensive scale that would be necessary. Yet as sev- 

 eral parties sent us their various ingredients, patented or otherwise, with 

 strong faith that in such they had discovered a locust panacea, we 

 endeavored to give some of the more reasonable of them fair trial. 



This we did the more wiliingly that it is possible to save special plants 

 by some such means where the owners of the plants set a sufficiently 

 high value upon them to warrant an amount of labor and expense that 

 they would not think of bestowing on the ordinary crops of the field 

 and garden. We, therefore, engaged Prof. E. L. Packard, of the Patent 

 Office, and formerly chemist in the Department of Agriculture, Wash- 

 ington, D. C, to go to Colorado last June, while the insects were about 

 two-thirds grown, and test various compositions and chemicals that had 

 either been recommended by correspondents' or which we ourselves 

 desired to have tried. Among them we will enumerate the following: 



