64 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



home, this species is known to live in all sorts of deciduous 

 trees, whereas in North America it has heretofore been found 

 only in cultivated apple and pear trees. Its occurrence in 

 tulip trees is, therefore, not only an interesting scientific fact 

 but of considerable economic importance, because the only 

 available remedy, viz : cutting off and burning the infested 

 branches, naturally loses a great deal of efficacy in view of the 

 fact that new beetles come from their wild food-plant or food- 

 plants and restock our orchard trees. The only preventive of 

 this new danger is a greater attention to clean forest culture on 

 the part of the farmers, and more especially the discontinuance 

 of the pernicious custom of burning the woods. If it is a de 

 plorable fact that the various borers in orchard trees are by far 

 more injurious in this country than their congeners are in 

 Europe, the burning of the woods is one of the principal 

 causes of this prevalence. The half-scorched trunks and 

 branches of our forest trees and shrubs form the most perfect 

 nidus for all sorts of borers, e. g., Chrysobothris femorata, 

 Amp/iicerus bicaudatus, Saperda Candida, and a host of others. 

 These insects thrive for one generation in the scorched wood, 

 and since this, after the lapse of one year, becomes too dry for 

 them, they have to oviposit in healthy trees, and naturally 

 choose our cultivated orchard and garden trees, because these 

 are more attractive to the beetles, more tender and less resist 

 ant than the healthy forest trees. 



From the nature of the burrows of these two Scolytids it 

 can at once be seen what amount of damage the beetles are 

 capable of inflicting : the burrowing of a single specimen is 

 necessarily fatal to a twig of considerable thickness. Of 

 Xyleborus tachygraphus nothing further is known ; but X. 

 dispar is known to oviposit not only in branches, but also in 

 the trunks of large trees. In this case the nature of the bur 

 row is changed : the gallery does not encircle the core of the 

 tree, but only enters the wood for a comparative^ short dis 

 tance, and branches out in perpendicular galleries. The 

 vitality of the tree is then in no way affected unless the beetles 

 are very numerous. This mode of attack has been described 

 by Dr. Fitch in his third New York Report (pp. 327-328), and 

 a good figure thereof is given by Eichhoff (Europ. Borken- 

 kafer, p. 271). 



Prof. Riley discussed briefly the question of the food-habits 

 of the larvae of Xyleborus (which he said was being investi 

 gated by Miss Ormerod), and took issue with Mr. Schwarz in 



