lt state. They have hard, shiny
wing-covers. Many of the borers are beetles, and there are other
varieties which do great damage, though other kinds are useful to man in
destroying harmful insects.

(6) Bugs have their mouth parts prolonged into a sharp beak with which
they puncture the skin or bark, instead of chewing the leaves, as do
beetles. Flies, gnats, and other similar insects do not usually injure
vegetation so much as do some other classes of insects, the principal
damage being done to fruits; but they have been found to be the cause of
some of the most serious diseases in both man and the lower animals.

The Department of Agriculture divides the injuries done by insects into
classes according to the products injured, and in the list they place
first the injury done to cereal crops.

The insects which damage the corn crop most seriously are the corn-root
worm, which feeds on the roots of young corn, causing it to fall over
and die, and which sometimes takes the whole corn crop of a large
region. The next most important is the boll-worm or ear-worm. Most
persons have seen this worm in the ears of sweet corn; ninety ears out
of every hundred contain a worm which destroys from one-tenth to
one-half the corn. Some years every ear in large regions is infested. In
the South the field corn is attacked as badly as the sweet corn, but in
the great corn states the injury is much less. Even here, however, the
total loss is very great.

Almost equally important is the damage wrought by the chinch-bug, which
is also one of the greatest pests in wheat and oats.

Every year in different sections of the country, bill-bugs, wire-worms,
cutworms, cornstalk borers, locusts, grasshoppers, corn plant-lice and
other insects, destroy millions of bushels of corn.

Of the cereal crops, wheat suffers most from insects. Of the large
number of insects that attack wheat, the three important species are the
Hessian fly, the chinch-bug and the grain plant-louse or green-bug.

The Hessian fly has been known to destroy as much as sixty per cent. of
all the wheat acreage of a state. Fortunately, this damage is done early
in the year, so that when whole fields are destroyed they can be
replanted with other crops and only the cost of seed and labor is to be
counted as a loss. But more often the field is only partly destroyed by
the fly; it is not necessary to replant, but the yield is small, often
not more than one-third. Some years the l