55 
perience of Minnesota and Dakota farmers teaches that the injury from 
the winged locusts is best avoided by growing such crops as will mature 
early. Reports were current in 1876 in Texas that farmers near Calvert 
had destroyed great quantities of the winged insects by tires lighted at 
night. We had on several occasions witnessed swarms of locusts driven 
before a prairie fire, and our general experience of locust habits at night 
forbade belief in the reports, and we requested one of our correspond- 
ents to inquire into the matter, with the following result: 
I took pains to trace up, while in Texas, the report that the spretus was attracted 
by a blaze. I found it, of course, baseless, though it had attained very respectable 
proportions. — (J. T. Mo niton, jr.) 
Moderate success has been had with smudging as a means of warding 
oft* the winged swarms. The best method is to start a fire which burns 
with insufficient access of air, and which is made, if possible, of materials 
which, while burning, will give off, besides the dense smoke due to in- 
complete combustion, uuoxidized products of distillation which in them- 
selves are noxious (e. g., buffalo chips, straw, and coal tar, etc.). The 
smoke and fumes from such a fire will prevent the locusts from alighting 
and swerve them from their course. Mr. S. T. Kelsey succeeded in sav- 
ing many of his young forest trees in Kansas, in 1874, by perseveringly 
smudging and smoking them. He gives his experience in the following 
words, in the Kansas Farmer, August 26, 1874 : 
At first we tried building fires on the ground, but it was not successful. The smoke 
would not go where we wanted it to. We then tried taking a bunch of hay and hold- 
ing it between sticks, set fire to it, aud then, passing through the field on the wind- 
ward side, held it so that the smoke would strike the grasshoppers. We would soon 
have a cloud of 'hoppers on the wing, and, by following it up, would, in a short time, 
clear the field. We have thus far saved everything that was not destroyed when we 
commenced fighting them; and while I do not give this as an infallible remedy, not 
having tried it sufficiently, yet it does seem to me, from what I have seen of it, that 
one good, active man, who would attend right to it, cou"id protect a20-acre field or a 
large orchard. But to be successful one must attend strictly to business. 
The great difficulty experienced in making the smudging successful 
is in the inconstancy of the winds, as a sudden change in wind direction 
may render much previous labor unavailing. Mr. W. D. Arnett, of Bear 
Creek, Colorado, who has given a good deal of attention to the practical 
means to be employed against locusts, has endeavored to meet the diffi- 
culty by using a portable iron bucket as a fire receptacle. A large sheet- 
iron bucket is fitted with a perforated tube, arranged across its bottom, 
open at one end to admit air, and there provided with a valve to regulate 
the admission of air. A perforated cover, hinged to the bucket, and a 
handle to carry it by, complete the arrangement. Filled with some sub- 
stance which bums imperfectly, such as buffalo chips and a little coal 
tar, and with the cover shut, an amount of air insufficient for complete 
combustion is admitted through the valved tube at the bottom, and the 
dense smoke comes out through the holes in the cover. 
The burning of old bones has been tried, but found to be no more effect- 
