oxious insects of New York, where he says: "I find that in our
wheat-fields here, the midge formed 59 per cent. of all the insects on
this grain the past summer; whilst in France, the preceding summer, only
7 per cent. of the insects on wheat were of this species. In France the
parasitic destroyers amounted to 85 per cent.; while in this country our
parasites form only 10 per cent."

"A true knowledge of practical entomology may well be said to be in its
infancy in our own country, when, as is well-known to agriculturists,
the cultivation of wheat has almost been given up in New England, New
York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, from the attacks of the wheat
midge, Hessian fly, joint worm, and chinch bug. According to Dr.
Shimer's estimate, says Mr. Riley, in his Second Annual Report on the
Injurious Insects of Missouri, which may be considered a reasonable
one, in the year 1864 three-fourths of the wheat, and one-half of the
corn crop were destroyed by the chinch bug throughout many extensive
districts, comprising almost the entire North-West. At the annual rate
of increase, according to the United States Census, in the State of
Illinois, the wheat crop ought to have been about thirty millions of
bushels, and the corn crop about one hundred and thirty-eight million
bushels. Putting the cash value of wheat at $1.25, and that of corn at
50 cents, the cash value of the corn and wheat destroyed by this
insignificant little bug, no bigger than a grain of rice, in one single
State and one single year, will therefore, according to the above
figures, foot up to the astounding total of _over seventy-three millions
of dollars_!"

The imported cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae), recently introduced from
Europe, is estimated by the Abbe Provatncher, a Canadian entomologist,
to destroy annually two hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of
cabbages around Quebec. The Hessian fly, according to Dr. Fitch,
destroyed fifteen million dollars' worth of wheat in New York State in
one year (1854). The army worm of the North (Leucania unipuncta), which
was so abundant in 1861, from New England to Kansas, was reported to
have done damage that year in Eastern Massachusetts exceeding half a
million of dollars. The joint worm (Isosoma hordei) alone sometimes cuts
off whole fields of grain in Virginia and northward. The Colorado potato
beetle is steadily moving eastward, now ravaging the fields in Indiana
and Ohio, and only the forethought an