HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 13 
Mr. Haskins. Has the State of Texas heretofore taken any action 
in this matter, toward eradicating it? 
Mr. Burcgss. Oh, yes, sir. We have had several acts of the legis- 
lature, and we have an agricultural and mechanical college actively at 
work. We have some experiment stations. We offered a $50,000 
reward, and organized a commission to visit different farmers and 
receive applications for the award and make different experiments 
and test different methods for the extermination of the boll weevil. 
Without going into the detail of it, I will just say that it panned out 
nothing. We found out nothing that would kill the bug, and the most 
that has been done, in my judgment, is due to the Department of Agri- 
culture, and especially to the two subdivisions, the Bureau of Ento- 
mology and the Bureau of Plant Industry (and primarily to the Bureau 
of Entomology), in the different experiments which have demonstrated 
that it will be possible to lessen very greatly the ravages of the weevil 
by breeding resistant sorts of cotton, and peculiar kinds of cotton, and 
early varieties of cotton. 
For instance, it is pretty well established and pretty generally 
accepted—and Iam a rather good boll-weevil authority myself, as I 
have been for eight years right where they are under my nose in every 
field, and it isa large agricultural county I live in—that the less leaves, 
the less foliage, the cotton has the better; that the more rapidly and 
earlier the squares form and the bigger the fruit at the first bounce, 
so to speak, the better, the reason being that this bug comes out in the 
winter in not very great numbers. The first crop, as we call it, of the 
boll weevil does not very seriously injure the cotton crop, but they 
reproduce so rapidly and so enormously that the second stage of them, 
when they shoot in the squares and the squares fall and their young 
come out of these fallen squares in boll weevils, and practically deyas- 
tate the fields wherever they go in, so that the earlier the foliage, the 
less the foliage, and the greater the cultivation the more you can make, 
for in addition to the facts that I have stated about them coming out 
in not so great numbers, it seems to be true that you can not kill the 
full-grown bug with heat or cold. We have frozen some of the scoun- 
drels in a bar of ice and kept them two days and then broken the bar 
of ice and put them in the sun and they thawed out and flew off. That 
sounds like a dream, but it is a fact; and heat seem not to affect the 
full-grown bug, but it does affect the larve. For instance, if there is 
less foliage on the cotton and these squares fall down to the ground, 
and the rows have been planted wide apart and broadside with the 
sun’s rays so that the sun falls down hot upon them, a very great many 
of them never hatch out. In other words, the intense heat of the sun 
will destroy the larve in the square, although it will not destroy the 
full-grown bug. 
So that these cultural methods are now apparently the main reliance. 
Of course we do not want the further investigation abandoned. I 
understand Doctor Howard contemplates further investigation, and, 
I think, very wisely. He has heard of some appearance of a bug like 
this down in Central or South America, and he wants to keep chasing 
the matter down to see if we can not find there a disease that can be 
communicated to the boll weevil, or a parasite that will prey upon him, 
so that, after the manner of the Department in the scale matter in 
California, they can rid us of the pest in that way. We want pursued 
all the different avenues that offer any practical relief. That is one of 
