BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 425 
woodchucks. At small expense, all the holes in a field may be 
fired with very little trouble. In our experience, it has been quite 
exceptional when one of the animals has ever shown himself again 
from a hole thus fumigated. In one locality indeed, where, from 
the character of the holes, or rather of the ground, an ordinary 
torch was found occasionally to be insufficient, one of my friends 
met the difficulty by having Mr. Wedger make for, him some 
‘double torches,” twice as heavily charged as the ordinary. 
From the effects of these extremely powerful engines no wood- 
chuck has thus far escaped. 
‘In order to prove beyond question that the smothering smoke of 
the torches does really suffocate the animals, my colleague, Mr. 
Edmund Hersey, having seen a woodchuck enter a hole in a sandy 
soil, put a sentinel on guard at the hole’s mouth to prevent the 
animal from escaping, and hastened to his house for a torch. 
Subsequently, some little time after the torch had been fired, he 
had his men dig out the hole where they soon found the dead 
woodchuck. 
This experiment of Mr. Hersey is not only interesting in itself, 
but is important as a verification of the fatal effect of the torch, 
for it is a fact that a woodchuck when once thoroughly alarmed 
will sometimes remain quietly in his hole for several days before 
he digs out and makes his escape. In some of my earlier experi- 
ments with inadequate mixtures of sulphur and touch-paper, I had 
repeated opportunity to observe this curious behavior which explains 
some extraordinary statements that have been published from time 
to time in the agricultural newspapers : — Such, for example, as 
that if a blank cartridge be fired from a gun into a burrow where 
a woodchuck is known to be and the hole is then closed with earth, 
the animal will never come out, but will either be smothered or 
frightened to death; or that in case a hole, known to contain a 
woodchuck, be plugged up with a wad of fusty old clothing — 
‘¢ smelling strongly of man’? — the animal will never dare to dig 
out. It is true enough that in some cases a woodchuck thus 
treated might not pluck up courage to make his escape until long 
after the person who tried the experiment had become tired of 
watching for signs of deliverance. 
It is to be observed, by the way, that the double torch above- 
mentioned might often be found useful as against foxes, not only 
