166 SANITARY ENTOMOLOGY 



thrown onto the pile or raked up and burned. The edges of the pile and 

 the ground around it may be treated with borax or oiled with creosote 

 or crude oil. 



In Panama it is a custom to set fire to the manure pile and bum it 

 down about a foot, thus covering the entire pile with ash. 



Broadcasting. — Often on farms it is practicable to take the daily 

 accumulation of manure and spread it over the fields. When the weather 

 is dry, or very hot, or too cold for fly breeding, this method is a very 

 desirable means of handling the manure problem, but the broadcasting 

 of fresh manure on moist ground in cloudy or moist weather may give rise 

 to great quantities of flies unless it is spread very thinly and the larvae 

 are not well matured when the manure is scattered. An illustration of a 

 manure spreader is given in plate VI. An undesirable method of spread- 

 ing manure is shown in plate VIII. 



Collection of Manure. — It is important that manure be collected and 

 removed from the vicinity of habitations at regular periods, sufficiently 

 frequent to remove the possibility of its becoming a source of fly breeding. 

 In army camps it is imperative that manure be daily removed from all 

 stables, picket lines and stable yards. In cities the ordinary accumula- 

 tions of private stables should be required to be removed once each week, 

 but in the meanwhile it must be either stored in bins or on maggot traps, 

 or daily treated with borax. The accumulations of large stables, livery 

 and feed stables, stockyards, etc., should be required to be removed daily. 



We may obtain some of our best illustrations of the proper handling 

 of manure from army practices followed during the Great War. Army 

 discipline makes it possible, when the command is properly educated to 

 the importance of it, to control the manure problem more eff^ectively 

 than under any other condition on a large scale. Tremendous quantities 

 of manure were produced in cantonments and shipped in ear or train 

 loads daily. Most of the larger cantonments that were located in pro- 

 gressive rural sections were able to farm out the manure to individual 

 farmers or to sell to contractors who shipped it by the carload daily 

 and distributed it to the rural population. When unable to do this the 

 army oflScials were compelled to resort to storage or destruction of the 

 manure as discussed in other paragraphs. 



Loading platforms for shipment of manure need to be carefully 

 watched and kept under strict supervision. If these platforms are loosely 

 built of framework elevated above the cars, much of the manure falls 

 through the cracks and over the edges, and great accumulations arise at 

 the sides of the tracks and between the tracks. A properly constructed 

 loading platform should have a cement base with the tracks imbedded in 

 the cement and should be daily flooded, the washings being swept into 

 piles and oiled, and burned when dry enough. The writer has found the 



