ance of American boasting. But the opposition was
overruled, and the triumphant result silenced all opposition. It is safe
to say that the general opinion among Portuguese orange-growers to-day
is very favourable to American enterprise and practical scientific
acumen.

The _Vedalia_ was earlier sent to the people in Alexandria and Cairo,
Egypt, where a similar scale was damaging the fig trees and other
valuable plants, and the result was again the same, the injurious
insects were destroyed. This was achieved only after extensive
correspondence and several failures. The active agent in Alexandria was
Rear Admiral Blomfield, of the British Royal Navy, a man apparently of
wide information, good judgment, and great energy.

The same thing occurred when the California people sent this saviour of
horticulture to South Africa, where the white scale had also made its
appearance.

It is not only beneficial insects, however, which are being imported,
but diseases of injurious insects. In South Africa the colonists suffer
severely from swarms of migratory grasshoppers, which fly from the north
and destroy their crops. They have discovered out there a fungus
disease, which under favorable conditions kills off the grasshoppers in
enormous numbers. At the Bacteriological Institute in Grahamstown,
Natal, they have cultivated this fungus in culture tubes, and have
carried it successfully throughout the whole year; and they have used it
practically by distributing these culture tubes wherever swarms of
grasshoppers settle and lay their eggs. The disease, once started in an
army of young grasshoppers, soon reduces them to harmless numbers. The
United States Government last year secured culture tubes of this
disease, and experiments carried on in Colorado and in Mississippi show
that the vitality of the fungus had not been destroyed by its long ocean
voyage, and many grasshoppers were killed by its spread. During the past
winter other cultures were brought over from Cape Colony, and the fungus
is being propagated in the Department of Agriculture for distribution
during the coming summer in parts of the country where grasshoppers may
prove to be destructively abundant.

[Illustration: Grasshopper dying from Fungus Disease]

Although we practically no longer have those tremendous swarms of
migratory grasshoppers which used to come down like devastating armies
in certain of our Western States and in a night devour everything green,
sti