7 
soak speedily into the ground, but a hardened crust will thus 
presently be formed which will hold the tar until it slowly dries 
out. Along this strip post-holes may be made as before, in which 
the chinch-bugs wilKbe caught even though the ground may be 
thoroughly wet. 
If as a consequence of mismanagement or accident clnncli-bugs 
succeed in crossing this barrier, they will accumulate upon the 
nearest corn, where they may be killed at slight expense by spiay- 
ing or sprinkling the plant with the kerosene emulsion, made and 
applied as follows: 
Dissolve one half pound of hard or soft soap in one gallon of 
water and heat to the boiling point. Remove from the stove and 
add two gallons of coal-oil, churning the mixture with a good 
force-pump for fifteen minutes. When the emulsion is formed, it 
will look like buttermilk. To each quart of this emulsion add 
fifteen quarts of water, and apply to the corn in a spray—prefer¬ 
ably before 10 a. m. or after 3 p. m. The bugs should be washed 
off so that they will float in the emulsion at. the base of the 
plant. A teacupful to a hill is generally sufficient, but the quan¬ 
tity must vary with the number of bugs infesting the corn. 
The ascertained cost of material per acre of corn treated will 
be less than seventy cents where the plants are practically cov¬ 
ered with chinch-bugs, and no more than thirty cents per acre 
where they are moderately infested. 
In all this procedure continual vigilance and indomitable per¬ 
sistence are indispensable. A single man or boy will guard from 
eighty to one hundred and fifty rods of the barrier, but he must 
be in the field early and late. This method may seem trouble¬ 
some and costly to the reader of this description,, but the actual 
expenditure of labor and money is practically insignificant as com¬ 
pared with the loss of crops which may thus be prevented; and 
the hope that the chinch-bug can be mastered without labor, 
money, and pluck, must be dismissed, for the present at least, as 
an unrealized dream. 
DESCRIPTION OE EXPERIMENTS WITH BARRIERS AND TRAPS. 
Experiments 1, 2, and 3 were made on a small scale to test the 
efficiency of the furrow and post-hole method for the arrest and 
destruction of chinch-bugs while escaping from fields of small 
grain at harvest time. Numbers 4 and 5 were made to test the 
value of the coal-tar barrier, and 6 was a practical test of the two 
combined. 
No. 1. This is a furrow experiment made July 10. A patch of 
wheat-stubble ground, 4x6 feet, was cleared off with a spade so 
that the surface was hard and smooth. Around this we dug up 
and pulverized a narrow strip of ground, in which a dusty furrow 
was made three inches deep inside and six inches outside, en¬ 
closing the entire patch. The outer face of this furrow had a 
slope varying from 50° to 60 . 
