and if so what proportion?

Remove a worm from one of the apples and examine it. How many legs has
it? What color is it and does it have hair upon its body? Can it crawl
fast? Does it spin silk? Put a number of the large worms in a jar and
examine from day to day and keep records of what happens. Collect a
number in the fall and keep them in a box outdoors during the winter. In
the spring watch them change to the pupa in the cocoon and a little
later the mature insect or codling moth, as it is commonly called, will
emerge. Describe the moth and pin a number of them for your collection.
What time in the spring do the caterpillars change to the pupa and when
do the moths emerge? If you keep the moths in a bottle they will lay
their small circular flat eggs where they can be seen by looking
closely. During the winter examine under the bark of apple trees and in
cracks and crevices about apple pens for the small silk cocoons
containing the worms. Examine in the same places in the spring about
apple blooming time and then in place of the small pink worms you will
find the small brown pupae. Keep these a few days and the moths will
appear.

What proportion of apples in your region are wormy? What are they used
for? Are the trees sprayed just after the blossoms fall to control the
pest? Where spraying is carefully done, are there as many wormy apples?
Why not spray all the orchards properly and have no worms?

Draw and describe the different stages of the apple worm or codling moth
and its injury to fruit.

* * * * *

"_O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt and taints of blood;_

"_That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;_

"_That not a worm is cloven in vain,
That not a moth with vain desire,
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain._"

--TENNYSON.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TOMATO OR TOBACCO WORM

[Illustration: Egg of Tomato worm moth enlarged.]

This insect is often very destructive to tomatoes and tobacco. Most
country boys and girls know it and fear its ugly looking horn. When full
grown it is four inches long, usually dark green with a number of
slanting white lines a