40 THE CHINCH BUG. 
to have been incorrect. Under date of July 16, 1865, he makes this 
observation. * * * "I found many dying on the low creek-bottom 
land from the effects of some disease, while they are yet in the larvse 
state — a remarkable and rare phenomenon for insects thus in such a 
wholesale manner to be dying without attaining their maturity, and no 
insect enemy or other efficient cause to be observed capable of pro- 
ducing this important result." Again, under date of July 22: "On 
low grounds the chinch bugs are dead from the disease above alluded 
to, and the same disease is spreading to the hills and high prairies." 
Under this date also he speaks of the very wet weather, and states 
that in a barley field the chinch bugs began to die at about the same 
time that they did on the low creek-bottom, and that they rapidly met 
the same fate, so that few of them lived to find their way to a neigh- 
boring cornfield, while under date of August 8 he states that of those 
that migrated to the cornfields "very few are to be found remaining 
alive; but the ground around the base of the cornhills is almost literally 
covered with their mouldering, decomposing dead bodies. They are 
dead everywhere, not lying on the ground alone, but sticking to the 
blades aud stalks of corn in great numbers, in all stages of develop- 
ment, larva, pupa, and imago." 
"This disease among the chinch bugs was associated with the long- 
continued wet, cloudy, cool weather that prevailed during a greater 
portion of the period of their development." * * * 
These are precisely the conditions under which these fungi have 
been observed to prove the most fatal to the chinch bug during recent 
years, where their introduction among the host insects was accom- 
plished by artificial means. While Dr. Shimer probably never antici- 
pated the artificial cultivation of his "disease," and the results which 
have since been obtained from its artificial dissemination in the fields, 
yet his careful and painstaking studies must ever be associated with 
the application of fungous diseases in the destruction of insects in 
America. It is certainly to be regretted that such practical entomol- 
ogists as Mr. B. D. Walsh aud Dr. C. V. Eiley should have expressed 
themselves so discouragingly regarding Dr. Shimer's observations and 
conclusions, Dr. Riley, so late as 1870, even going so far as to ridicule 
the theory of disease being in anyway responsible for the death of the 
chinch bugs observed by Dr. Shimer.* 
It was not until 1879 that an entomologist came to the rescue of Dr. 
Shimer's theory of disease among chinch bugs. Dr. Cyrus Thomas, in 
his Bulletin No. 5, of the United States Entomological Commission, 
1879, page 24, stated that while Dr. Shimer's plague among chinch 
bugs was somewhat extraordinary, yet it was in accordance with facts 
that he had himself ascertained in reference to other insects, and, in 
proof, cited a similar wholesale destruction of flies in southwestern 
Virginia and eastern Tennessee in the year 1849, and also a similar 
* Second Report State Entomologist of Missouri, pp. 24-25, 1870. 
