87 



no assistant and being absent from home nincli of the time prevented 

 my rearin<>- anything". 



^Ye had fairly gotten over this irruption, so to speak, by the middle 

 of June, when I went to the section where chinch bugs [Blissus leucop- 

 /e/7/.s)had occurred last year, having been infornuMl that a field of corn 

 had been destroyed by this pest. The trouble, however, turned out to 

 be tlie work of the broad striped Ilea beetle {Systena tanuata). and I 

 could see or learn of no indication of an outbreak of the i)est in the 

 section of country- where they were the most numerous last fall. This 

 was the last week of June. Within a week an occasional letter came 

 complaining of the appearance of chinch bugs, but these came from 

 central Ohio, considerably to the east of the area of occurrence in even 

 small numbers last year, and little attention was i)aid to the matter for 

 two or three days. But complaints continued to pour in, some of them 

 accompanied by specimens, thus leaving no doubt as to the validity of 

 the statements. A trip through the central i)ortion of the State about 

 the 10th of July left no doubts as to the truth of the complaints nor of 

 the extent of the ravages of this pest. It had clearly been breeding 

 unnoticed in the wheat lields. and when such were harvested this pest 

 migrated to the corntields adjoining, as is its wont. As one of my cor- 

 resi)oudents expressed himself, it was like a clap of thunder out of a 

 clear sky. Thousands of farmers within the three worst infested coun- 

 ties — Franklin, Delaware, and Union — had never seen a chinch bug, 

 and many had sent specimens to me asking what they were. I may 

 here say that in the above-mentioned counties I saw the bugs as abun- 

 dant as I ever did in Illinois or western Indiana during the years of 

 their greatest abundance. Farmers were struck with consternation 

 and appealed to the station, the State University, and even to Gov- 

 ernor McKinley for aid in destroying the scourge. The Department of 

 Agriculture at Washington, Professor Forbes, State entomologist of 

 Illinois, and Professor Snow, of Kansas, were applied to for nuiscar- 

 dine fungus with which to destroy the bugs, there seeming to be an 

 exaggerated idea that if some of this or infected bugs were placed in 

 a field it would sweej) off the pest instanter and stop its spread then 

 and there — an idea that certainly did not originate with anything that 

 I had either stated or written. 



It was of no avail to attempt to explain that the fungus SporoiricJnnn 

 f/Iohulifenim. while it would work <juite rapidly in wet weather, would 

 be ahnost wholly ineffectual in the midst of the drought that was i)re- 

 vailing at that time. I had received eight packages of the nuiscardine 

 fungus from Professor Forbes, and at once began infecting chinch bugs 

 to send out to such farmers as would apply for it, warning them, how- 

 ever, that it could not be relied up(ni to sto]) the spread of the pest 

 quickly, but that the true object in distributing it was to ward off 

 another visitation next season, if possible, in case the weather was favor- 

 able to the development of the pest. We have distributed something 



