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benefit of his community unless he knows that the other members of 

 the community will do the same. 



The situation is essentially like that presented several years ago 

 when the prosperity of fruit culture — its profitable continuance even 

 — were threatened by an invasion by a destructive foreign insect 

 known as the San Jose scale. This emergency was met in Illinois and in 

 most other American states by making it the duty of all growers of 

 horticultural products to keep their premises free from insect and fun- 

 gus pests of every description which are liable to spread to the prop- 

 erty of others, and enforcing this requirement by appropriate penal- 

 ties. Legislation of this character has not only put it within the power 

 and made it the duty of some state official — in Illinois the State Ento- 

 mologist — to protect endangered property — by legal process if neces- 

 sary — but it has acted powerfully to impress the public concerned with 

 a sense of their duty in the premises, and through the resulting publi- 

 cations of the entomologist's office, the agricultural papers, and the 

 like, to instruct the people thoroly in a whole class of subjects of 

 which they would otherwise have remained in ignorance to their own 

 great loss and to that of their communities and of the country at large. 



Influenced by these considerations I sent out, in January, 1915, 

 the following letter to twenty-nine prominent farmers residing in 

 districts badly injured by the chinch-bug the preceding year, and to 

 three other persons officially cognizant of the facts. 



' ' An outbreak of the chinch-bug in Illinois, which began in a few 

 southwestern counties in 1910, has now reached a crisis which forcibly 

 illustrates our helplessness against a considerable class of destructive 

 raids of the insect pests of agriculture because we are not able to se- 

 cure, by any means now available, sufficiently general action by 

 farmers concerned to get the benefit of cooperative measures. The 

 actual loss last year (1914) in corn alone, due to the chinch-bug, 

 amounted, for Illinois, to not less than $2,700,000,* and there is at 

 present a prospect of a much more extensive infestation during 1915. 



* : The chinch-bug breeds, as you doubtless know, in two generations, 

 the first mainly in wheat and the second mainly in corn. The first 

 generation, hatching from eggs laid in spring, has not yet got its wings 

 at the time of the wheat harvest, and hence must leave the stubble 

 fields on foot to find fresh pastures in corn, oats, and forage grasses. 

 It can be stopped, trapped, and destroyed by barriers and traps laid 

 down at the borders of the infested wheat-fields at a usual cost, for 

 the season, of less than ten dollars a mile in money and an additional 

 ten to twenty dollars a mile in farm labor; and every insect so dis- 

 posed of at this time is ordinarily equivalent to a hundred times as 

 many of the next generation which would hatch from eggs laid in the 

 corn. 



'This estimate was far too small. The actual loss was more than $5,000,000. 



