f
the potato-stalk which it inhabits: and it comes out in the beetle state
about the last of August or beginning of September.

The stalk inhabited by the larva wilts and dies. The perfect beetle,
like many other snout-beetles, must of course live through the winter,
to reproduce its species the following spring. In Southern Pennsylvania,
some years, nearly every stalk of extensive fields is infested by this
insect, causing the premature decay of the vines, and giving them the
appearance of having been scalded. In some districts of Illinois, the
potato crop has, in some seasons, been utterly ruined by this
snout-beetle, many vines having a dozen larvae in them. This insect
attacks no plant but the potato.

~The Potato-Worm~, (_Sphinx 5-maculata_, Haworth.)--This well-known
insect, the larva of which (Fig. 3,) is usually called the potato-worm,
is more common on the closely allied tomato, the leaves of which it
often clears off very completely in particular spots in a single night.
When full-fed, which is usually about the last of August, the
potato-worm burrows under the ground, and shortly afterward transforms
into the pupa state, (Fig. 5.) The pupa is often dug up in the spring
from the ground where tomatoes or potatoes were grown in the preceding
season, and most persons that meet with it suppose that the singular
jug-handled appendage at one end of it is its _tail_. In reality,
however, it is the _tongue-case_, and contains the long, pliable tongue
which the future moth will employ in lapping the nectar of flowers. The
moth itself (Fig. 4) was formerly confounded with the tobacco-worm moth,
(_Sphinx Carolina_, Linnaeus,) which it very closely resembles, having
the same series of orange-colored spots on each side of the abdomen.

The gray and black markings, however, of the wings differ perceptibly in
the two species; and in the tobacco-worm moth there is always a more or
less faint white spat, or a dot, near the centre of the front wing,
which is never met with in the other species. The potato-worm often
feeds on the leaves of the tobacco plant in the Northern States. In the
Southern States, in Mexico and the West-Indies, the true potato-worm is
unknown, and it is the tobacco-worm that the tobacco-grower has to
fight. The potato-worm, however, is never known to injure the potato
crop to any serious extent.

~The Striped Blister-Beetle~, (_Lytta vittata_, Fabr.) This insect (Fig.
6) is almost exclusively a so