The rapid migration of a dangerous insect through the medium of commerce is well illustrated by the instance of the pink bollworm of cotton, native to India and the most destructive pest of cotton. In about 1908, bales of cotton which contained a very high proportion of infested cotton seed from India were sent to an Egyptian spinning mill. The Egyptian infestation was not discovered until 1910, when the worm was already well established in widely separated localities. In an attempt to improve cotton varieties for planting in the Laguna district of Coahuila, New Mexico, a cotton grower planted imported Egyptian cotton seed in a field near Monterrey, thereby introducing the pink bollworm to a new country. When this infestation was first reported in November 1916, the worm was found to have spread throughout the entire Laguna district. Surveys were begun in the vicinity of 11 cottonseed-crushing mills in Texas that had received seed from the Laguna area. By the end of 1917, infestations had been found in cotton fields adjacent to two of the mills. Further, an extensive infestation was found late in 1917 at Anahuac, Texas, on Trinity Bay. The latter spread was attributed to Mexican cottonseed that was washed far inland when the great storm of 1915 wrecked a Mexican steamship [en route] to Galveston, Texas. Thus in less than a decade a major cotton pest, through a series of intercontinental distributional leaps, was spread through commercial channels from Asia to Africa, and to the North American continent.