ABSTRACT
The use of chemicals to control pests dates back more than 3000 years to the Chinese, who discovered that sulfur was effective as a fumigant, and then in the sixteenth century, they discovered that arsenic could be used as an insecticide.1 Tobacco leaf (nicotine) and the seed of Strychnos nux vomica (strychnine) were used as rodenticides in the eighteenth century,2 and the insecticidal active botanicals, including rotenone derived from the root of Derris elliptica and pyrethrum from the ¦owers of chrysanthemums, were used as insecticides in the mid-1800s. Bordeaux mixture (copper sulfate, lime, calcium hydroxide, and water) was introduced in France for mildew control in grapes in 1880.1 Paris green (copper arsenite) and calcium arsenite were used extensively by the turn of the twentieth century to control the Colorado potato beetle.2
