212 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The beetle resembles the common lady-bh-ds, but is rather 

 larger than most of them, and the wing covers are light yel- 

 low, each marked with seven black spots. The larva is yellow, 

 and armed along the back with rows of branching, thorn-like 

 spines, tipped with black. Instances of this kind are not at 

 all uncommon, and the only remedy is a diffusion of some 

 knowledge of insects among farmers themselves. 



A knowledge of insects is also necessary to the farmer for 

 quite another reason. Take up almost any of our agricultural 

 journals, and you seldom fail to find prescriptions vouched by 

 somebody to be unfailing preventives of the ravages of some 

 particular insect, or even for all the insects which attack a 

 given plant). All sorts of patent and other machines and nos- 

 trums are advertised, recommended, and too many, even, sold 

 through the country. Nine-tenths of these machines, nos- 

 trums, and prescriptions, are utterly useless and worthless. 

 Not that tlie correspondents of the journals and the inventors 

 intentionally falsify; knowing nothing of the structure or 

 habits of insects, they jump at some conclusion on insufficient 

 observation, and, having formed an opinion, they hold fast to 

 it in the face of all reason. In the majority of these cases 

 even a very rudimentary knowledge of entomology would con- 

 vince any one of the worthlcssness of the remedies. A crop 

 rf)f some farmer is attacked by insects, no matter what they 

 may be or what their habits, he applies lime, salt, ashes, 

 or saw-dust, and in due time the insects disappear, the natural 

 time for them to go into the ground to transform having ar- 

 rived, or some of their natural enemies having swept them off, 

 and at once he concludes that his remedy has done the work, 

 and it is heralded abroad as a true specific. I can recall a 

 dozen of the most absurd remedies for the borers in fruit trees, 

 most of them the boring in the trees of holes ten times bigger 

 than the borers themselves ever made, and filling them with 

 all sorts of substances, no two of the doctors agreeing as to 

 what. 



The female of the canker-worm is wingless, and conse- 

 quently obliged to crawl up the tree-trunks to deposit her 

 eggs ; so if any means are taken, by applications to the trunk 



