d ingenuity in devising means of
checking its attacks, resulting from a thorough study of its habits,
will deliver our wasted fields from its direful assaults.

These are the injuries done by the more abundant kinds of insects
injurious to crops. We should not forget that each fruit or shade tree,
garden shrub or vegetable, has a host of insects peculiar to it, and
which, year after year, renew their attacks. I could enumerate upwards
of fifty species of insects which prey upon cereals and grass, and as
many which infest our field crops. Some thirty well known species ravage
our garden vegetables. There are nearly fifty species which attack the
grape vine, and their number is rapidly increasing. About seventy-five
species make their annual onset upon the apple tree, and nearly an equal
number may be found upon the plum, pear, peach and cherry. Among our
shade trees, over fifty species infest the oak; twenty-five the elm;
seventy-five the walnut, and over one hundred species of insects prey
upon the pine.

Indeed, we may reasonably calculate the annual loss in our country
alone, from noxious animals and the lower forms of plants, such as rust,
smut and mildew, as (at a low estimate) not far from five hundred
million dollars annually. Of this amount, at least one-tenth, or fifty
million dollars, could probably be saved by human exertions.

To save a portion of this annual loss of food stuffs, fruits and lumber,
should be the first object of farmers and gardeners. When this saving is
made, farming will become a profitable and safe profession. But while a
few are well informed as to the losses sustained by injurious insects,
and use means to ward off their attacks, their efforts are constantly
foiled by the negligence of their neighbors. As illustrated so well by
the history of the incursions of the army worm and canker worm, it is
only by a combination between farmers and orchardists that these and
other pests can be kept under. The matter can be best reached by
legislation. We have fish and game laws; why should we not have an
insect law? Why should we not frame a law providing that farmers, and
all owning a garden or orchard, should cooperate in taking preventive
measures against injurious insects, such as early or late planting of
cereals, to avert the attacks of the wheat midge and Hessian fly; the
burning of stubble in the autumn and spring to destroy the joint worm;
the combined use of proper remedies against the c