Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 April 1875 — Paris Green. [ARTICLE]

Paris Green.

There is no 16nger any room for doubt that the common habit among farmers of applying Paris green to potatoes to save them from the ravages of bugs is using a remedy that is worse than the disease. This is saying a good deal when we bear in mind that the loss sustained by the country during the last ten yeafs from the destruction of the potato crop is estimated by good judges to exceed the whole cost of the late war; but the facts will more than justify the statement. Many of the best chemists both in this country and in Europe have protested repeatedly and-strongly against the,reckless use of so villainous a compound and have invoked the interference of the law to prevent it. They urge several good and sufficient reasons, and fortify them by a startling array of facts. Paris green is a compound of arsenic and copper, both of them poisonous when taken into the human system, and the former of them a most deadly poison. Arsenic is not only poisonous when swallowed but when applied to cuts or wounds, or when taken into the lungs as vapor or fine dust. Deaths have occurred from inhaling the steam arising from water in which arsenic was boiled. When combined with copper, forming Paris green, the copper acts in one respect as a diluent, in another it helps to form a more subtle and dangerous poison. A larger dose of Paris green would be required to produce death than of the pure arsenic; but arsenic, on the other hand, may be taken into the system in minute quantities for some time without necessarily prove injurious. Paris green is a more difficult thing for the body to get rid of; it remains in the system longer, and its effects, if taken repeatedly in minute doses, are cumulative. It is then far more likely to give rise to occult disease, and the patient dies, as it were, who sifts Paris green on his potato vines’ every week or so during the season places his health in imminent peril, for he can scarcely fail to breathe considerable quantities of the poison. Many alarming cases of sickness and some deaths have even occurred from breathing the air of a room contaminated by the fine dust arising from wall-paper or curtains painted with the arseniate of copper. The second reason against its use is that it is likely to poison the ground on which it is spread, rendering it less productive, and in time useless; or, worse still, be taken up by the cereals which are raised upon it, and become a poison in our daily bread. That many mineral poisons are thus taken up from the soil by plants appears to be a well-established tact; there is no reason to believe that Paris green will prove an exception; and, until it is so proved, all men with the facts before them, who have the lives and welfare of humanity more at heart than their potato crop, will refuse to sow the poison broadcast in the soil. In the meantime it would be wisdom to experiment more fully on the effects of vegetable poisons on destructive insects. It is not unlikely that some alkaloid of vegetable origin may be found that will be both cheap and effective, Without the objections that attend the employment of a mineral poison. Tie fact that quinine is a most deadly poison to many of the lower animals, while a most valuable medicine to man, ought to furnish a hint as to the direction investigations should take. A recent article in a scientific journal states that a decoction of the common mandrake root (podophyllum peltatum) is effective in destroying potato bugs. The plant is common everywhere, ana it will cost but little to test its efficacy.— Interior.