Company reports do not as a rule make very absorbing
read- ing. One that does year by year is that of Pest Control, which turns an honest penny or two for its shareholders by making life hard for insect pests the world over. In the past year it has been dropping an obnoxious kind of spray on potatoes in Norfolk (for the benefit of Colorado beetles, if any) and on cock- chafers deleterious to oak-trees in the Upper Rhone Valley, in both cases from helicopters. Vast areas of cotton have been sprayed in the Sudan, and coffee and sisal in East Africa ; tobacco has been dealt with in Southern Rhodesia. I understand that a year or two ago the company was tickling swollen-shoot- the disastrous cocoa-tree disease in the Gold Coast ; as there is no reference to this in the report it may not have been one of the successes. The trouble about sprays tends to be that while they are fatal to noxious insects, they are apt to be equally so to what are known as " beneficial insects " like bees. But this problem seems to have been solved by the discovery of a toxic substance which, if applied to the roots .of a plant, gets taken up into the stalk and leaf, with lethal effects on insects unwise enough to go plant-eating, but no effect at all on bees, which merely suck something sweet from the flowers. It must add zest to life to be employed by this enterprise, which, incidentally, has been worked up from nothing by an Austrian scientist who came to this country in the 'thirties.
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