STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. ](^| 



are suggested by su})erstition ?. Fear stimulates imagination ; the pecu- 

 liar and often fantastic or repugnant forms, together with size, suggest 

 to the ignorant the presence of supernatural powers ; they become to 

 them at once messengers from the realms of the mysterious, even the 

 harbingers of death. 



But let us turn over this leaf of the dark powers and ot th(^se hu- 

 man infirmities; there are beneficent insects; they, totj, claim a jilacc in 

 the arch. Though they are but faw m number of species over against 

 the destructive and injurious ones, they arc by no means unimportant. 

 These few have already in very early days largely contributed to the 

 wealth and comfort of man ; they are the Ree, the Silkworm, the Coccus, 

 and last the Spanish-fly. The Coccus under different names was known 

 to all the oriental nations, and prized for its scarlet properties, though it 

 is said that the insect was supposed to be a vegetable ])roduction. 



As colonization extended and civilization progressed, vegetables 

 for man and feed for animals increased in variety ; so have insects ; new 

 species, or such as had before been unknown because they inhabited 

 uncultivated districts of forest and prairie, have urged themselves ujjon 

 the notice of man, often for evil it is true. Yet the science of Entomol- 

 ogy having grown in the meantime, and divested herself of the tutelage 

 of superstition, had commenced to notice and reach out to all, whether 

 injurious or not, grew to independence — to rank with her twin sister. 

 Botany. 



In a [ia])er re;id during last summer before the Alton Horticultural 

 Society, I alluded among other things to the gradual disappearance of 

 some insects from once uninhabited prairie districts ; in a conversation had 

 lately with an old settler in my county, which by-the-way had. not longer 

 than fifteen or twenty years ago. thousands of acres of prairie lakes, so 

 that it received the epithet u\ Progpond. — I learned something about 

 the small green horse-fly, — Tahaniis liiiri>la, \\hi( h goes to confinn the 

 statement alluded to. 



He said that befoie the days of railroads, when larmers Irom Greene, 

 Jersey, and Macoupin ctninties took their produce to Alton over ro.uls 

 leading over raw prairies, and around the numerous lakes, they had to 

 travel only nights, on ai » ouiu of that lly. Tiie lar\;e of it, like others 

 of the genus, live on decaying vegelal)le matter in marshes, just such as 

 were afforded them by those prairie lakes. N'ow they have disajipi ared. 

 Railroads and the plow have drained them, that vegetable matter has 

 assimilated with the soil, and the yearly ])iowings of course have disas- 

 trously interfered with the inc rease and breeding of the fly, so that now 

 it is counted with the ]»lagues that were. 



INSI'XT NA.MKS AND I 1 1 1 I K DERIVATION. 



It is obvious to nil, do doiibt, thai il is necessary in science to use a 

 common language to name its subjci ts, legible ami lomprehensiblc to 

 the students of all nations, and thus facilitate scientific intercourse on 

 the subject between people of different languages, and avoid the other- 



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