Weihaiwei, Sept, 20—Of all the troubles which afflict the just (local term for a fruit grower) none has been worse this year than the borers which, by reason of their foul trade, prefer the trees with softer woods and have therefore descended upon the apple and fig trees. There is more than one kind of borer but ours seem to be the progeny of a fairly large ashy-grey and brown moth called the Goat Moth (Cossus cossus). This moth flies at night (June/July) and lays its eggs in cracks and crevices in the tree-bark—generally quite low down but sometimes up to 8 feet above the ground. The caterpillars are soon hatched and feed below the bark, but as soon as they are big enough they begin boring into the tree making quite a large hole and throwing out the chewed wood-chips behind them, the little heaps of these on. the ground below the tree being the first evidence of the infestation to the enraged fruit grower whose tree may contain scores of borers which, if left alone, will ultimately destroy it. A badly infested' tree must be cut down and burnt. Old fashioned remedies include the injection of paraffin, nicotine etc. and the insertion of a wire to stab and kill the caterpillar, but the only real remedy I know is the insertion of a few small crystals of a very strong kind of benzene, plugged home with a lump of mud; this produces a gas which kills the pests in their sealed chamber and is really quite effective: there are several varieties of such benzene but the only one I know is called by the chemists (bless their simple hearts) Paradichlorbenzene for short. The moth which causes all this trouble is, by the way, said to be called the Goat Moth because the caterpillars smell like a goat or is it possibly because they get the fruit grower's goat?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.