Trap-plants for Eelivorms. 
173 
The cowman was permitted to supplement this by adding as much 
cut oat or barley straw as he thought necessary. The cows weighed 
between 700 lbs. and 800 lbs. each. 
I never allowed wheat straw to be used for feeding, considering 
it could be turned to better account, and regarding it as not a very 
digestible food. A very small quantity of cabbage to February, and 
mangel after that date, were allowed, 
John B, Spearing, 
TRAP-PLANTS FOR EELWORMS. 
Amongst the minute pests that cause serious loss to growers of crops 
the Eelworms have acquired a leading place. They occupy but a 
humble position in the scale of animal life, being very far below the 
insects which furnish the greater number of the animal pests of 
cultivated plants. Eelworms are members of a group of delicate, 
slender, minute organisms known as threadworms, a good example of 
which is afforded by Trichina spiralis, a parasite which infests swine, 
and gives rise to the disorder called “trichinosis,” the latter sometimes 
attacking the human subject through the medium of imperfectly 
cooked pork or bacon. 
The eelworms, or Anguillulidte, as the systematist names them, 
are associated in the experience of English farmers with the trouble- 
some disorder termed “clover sickness,” which sometimes leads to 
great loss of plant in the clover-field. The parasite which attacks 
the stein of the clover plant is TylencJms devaslatrix, and the same 
pest is often equally mischievous in the case of oats, bringing about 
in that crop the disorder to which the names of “ tulip-root ” and 
“ segging ” are applied. A closely-allied eelworm, Tylenchus tritici, 
produces the “ ear cockles,” or “ purples,” of wheat, the grain be- 
coming filled with immense numbers of minute eelworms, which can 
easily be brought into view when such a diseased grain is broken in 
a tumbler of clear water, the liquid at once becoming alive with 
thousands of the writhing nematodes. 
There is another of these eelworms of which, however, we have 
hitherto heard little more than mere whispers in this country. It is 
called lleterodera Schachlii, and it is the cause of much havoc to the 
beetroot and mangel crops of tlie Continent. Its appearance on an 
extensive scale at any time in England would be a circumstance, 
therefore, that could cause no surprise, although, considering the 
costly character of the mangel crop, it might prove a great calamity. 
It is with this particular eelworm that the present note is con- 
cerned. 
Up to about thirty years ago the parasite under notice does not 
seem to have been specifically identified, but in 1859 Hermann 
Schacht, of Bonn, in the course of a long series of researches upon the 
maladies of mangel and beet, brought the pest to light, though he fell 
