24 
Prof. F. H. Snow’s distribution to Kansas farmers of about fifty 
packages of chinch-bugs in 1889 and of thirty-eight such packages in 
1890, led to legislative action in Kansas, in March, 1891, of a kind 
to bring about a new departure in American economic entomology, 
inasmuch as appropriations were then made by the General Assem¬ 
bly of that State for the establishment and maintenance of a 
laboratory whose function it should be to prepare and distribute 
to farmers, free of exi)ense to them, material capable of conveying 
the chinch-bug diseases by contagion to healthy insects in their 
fields. This laboratory, established at the Kansas State Univer¬ 
sity at Lawrence, Kansas, has continued in operation to the pres¬ 
ent writing (1894). From it were sent out 1,400 lots of dead or 
infected chinch-bugs in 1891, 1,848 in 1892, and 3,803 in 1893, or 
over 7,000 for these three years. These lots consisted each of a 
few infected bugs, commonly less than a dozen, and were accom¬ 
panied by directions to the recipient for their use in propagating 
the white muscardine, first in closed boxes and thence in the field. 
As it was intended that the contagion boxes thus established should 
be used continuously for the multiplication of the parasitic Sporo- 
trichum, and as many farmers were frequently supplied from a sin¬ 
gle box, establishing by this means boxes of their own, the actual 
number of trials was doubtless much greater than 7,000. 
The method of these field distributions was necessarily such 
that only a very small part of them could be preceded and criti¬ 
cally followed up by expert inspection in the field, and the state¬ 
ment of. results reported consequently rests almost wholly on the 
observation and judgment of the farmers to whom this contagion 
material was sent. Generalizing their usually uncritical and uncriti¬ 
cised statements, it appears from the voluminous annual reports 
of the Kansas laboratory that approximately 59 per cent, of the 
cases have been classed as successful experiments, 24 per cent, as 
doubtful, with a remaining 17 per cent, as unsuccessful “on the 
face of the returns.” If we accept as decisive only reported 
observations of dead cliincli-bugs in the field following upon the 
introduction of the contagion material, the number of such cases 
amounts for 1891 and 1893 (reckoned separately and afterward 
combined) to approximately 33 per cent, of the whole; or if, 
remembering the notoriously common blunder of the average 
observer in mistaking cast skins of chinch-bugs for dead insects, 
we accept only those reports of success in which mention is made 
of fungus-covered bugs, we find the ratio of such reports to be 
about 18 per cent. 
There are abundant reasons, however, to lead us to discount 
heavily.even these last ratios if we would be certain to include in 
our estimate only cases of proved success. In the first place, there 
is only occasional evidence that these farmers’ observations in their 
own fields were checked by simultaneous and parallel observations 
in other fields not previously infected. Nothing seems usually to 
have been done, that is, to detect and eliminate cases of a gen¬ 
eral spontaneous occurrence of muscardine. There is also' little or 
