324 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 



APPLE. TRUNK. 



smooth round hole, of the exact size requisite to enable it to crawl 

 out from the tree. This hole is commonly only four or six inches 

 above the surface of the ground. And sometimes a worm will be 

 met with boring its cylindrical burrow in the wood of the root, in 

 a situation where it is evident it intends to pass its pupa state 

 under the ground and emerge below or at the surface. 



Although this borer is a native insect which has always existed 

 upon this continent, it appears to be recently that it has taken up 

 its residence in the apple tree. Aged persons inform me that no 

 insect except the caterpillar was formerly known to infest this 

 tree; and it is quite certain that our predecessors, fifty and a 

 hundred years ago, with the little attention they were accustomed 

 to bestow upon their orchards, could not have had such thrifty, 

 large, long lived trees as we know were common at that time, if 

 this and other insects attacked them then as they do now. We 

 have met with no record, pointing this out as a- depredator, until 

 the year 1824, when Mr. Say, describing this species, notes that 

 " In the larva state it is very injurious to the apple tree, boring 

 into the wood." And the following spring its character appears 

 to have become known in the vicinity of Albany for the first time. 

 The reminiscence is one of too much interest in the history of this 

 insect to be permitted to pass into oblivion. April 27th, 1825, • 

 the late Philip Heartt of Troy, in a letter to Jesse Buel, states 

 that an orchard of young trees which he would not have parted 

 with for two thousand dollars, he had just discovered were all 

 girdled and destroyed, or very nearly so, by worms under the bark, 

 of all sizes, from that of a large yellow grub, downward. Some 

 of these insects at that early season were found in their perfect 

 state, from which Dr. James Eights, Jr. ascertained them to be the 

 species which Mr. Say had recently named and described. Judge 

 Buel hereupon wrote to Mr. Say, soliciting further information 

 and a remedy, who replied, recommending a measure which had 

 then lately been found successful against the peach root borer, 

 namely, placing common mortar around the root of the tree. This 

 correspondence is published in full in the Memoirs of the New- 

 York Board of Agriculture, vol. iii, commencing on page 478; 

 and from it some facts may be gathered respecting the habits of 



