279 



the specimens will be seut back). If you do not care to take the trouble 

 to list such rearings, if you will send breeding memoranda with the 

 specimens, we will have them listed for you and then, if you desire, will 

 publish them in Ixsect Life. (3) Pay as much attention as possible 

 to this matter of parasites, and save carefully everything reared. 



If this course is followed for say two or three seasons, I feel satisfied 

 that a most creditable and extremely valuable compilation can be made, 

 which I am confident will be one of the works most often referred to bj' 

 the working economic entomologist. 



Mr. Snow then presented the following : 



EXPERIMENTS FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF CHINCH BUGS IN THE 

 FIELD BY THE ARTIFICIAL INTRODUCTION OF CONTAGIOUS 

 DISEASES. 



By F. H. Snow. 



These experiments have beeu continued through the two seasons of 

 1889 and 1890, and have been remarkably successful. As Entomologist 

 to the Kansas State Board of Agriculture I had prepared an article for 

 the annual meeting of that Board in January, 1889, stating what was 

 known at that time upon the subject, and calling attention to the in- 

 vestigations of Professors Forbes, Burrili, and Lugger. In June, 1889, 

 a letter was received from Dr. J. T. Curtiss, of Dwight, Morris County, 

 Kansas, announcing that one of the diseases mentioned in the article 

 (Entomophthora) was raging in various fields in that region, and stating 

 that in many places in fields of oats and wheat the ground was fairly 

 white with the dead bugs. Some of these dead bugs were at once ob- 

 tained and experiments were begun in the entomological laboratory of 

 the university. It was found that living, healthy bugs, when placed in 

 the same jar with the dead bugs from Morris County were sickened and 

 killed within 10 days. A Lawrence newspaper reporter, learning of this 

 tact, published the statement that any farmers who were troubled by 

 chinch bugs might easily destroy them from their entire farms by sending 

 to me for some diseased bugs. This announcement was published all over 

 the country, and in a few days I received applications from Agricultural 

 Experiment Stations and farmers in nine different States, praying for 

 a few ''diseased and deceased" bugs with which to inoculate the de- 

 stroying pests with a fatal disease. Some fifty packages were sent out 

 during the season of 1889, and the results were in the main highly 

 favorable. 



It was my belief that sick bugs would prove more serviceable in the 

 dissemination of disease than dead bugs. I accordingly sent out a cir- 

 cular letter with each package, instructing the receiver to place the 

 dead bugs in ajar for 48 hours, with from ten to twenty times as many 

 live bugs from the field, In this way the disease would be communi- 

 cated to the live bugs in the jar. These sick bugs being deposited in 



