350 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 



PEAR. TRUNK. 



I am not perfectly certain that it is caused by the insect to which 

 I attribute it. The importance of the facts which I have to report, 

 will appear from a few preliminary remarks. 



The history of the plum weevil or curculio, so far as at present 

 known, is briefly as follows. The beetle makes its appearance in 

 May and June, cuts a crescent-shaped incision in young plums 

 and other fruits, dropping an egg in the wound, the worm from 

 which, boring in the fruit, causes it to fall from the tree, and the 

 worm becoming fall grown, buries itself in the ground, where it 

 remains from three to six weeks, and having completed its trans- 

 formations the beetle again comes abroad in July and August. 

 But what becomes of it from this time until the following spring 

 is not yet ascertained. Although this insect and its destructive 

 habits have been so long known in this country, and every owner 

 of a plum tree has year after year endured the most vexatious 

 disappointments from it, we to this day remain in ignorance of 

 its abode and condition during half the year. Most persons who 

 have written upon it, have supposed that some of the worms were 

 so late in leaving the fruit that they remained in the ground 

 through the winter and from these come the beetles which appear 

 in the spring; and several of the remedies which have been 

 recommended for abating this evil have been based upon this 

 theory. But that a whole generation of these insects should be 

 brought forth abortively each summer, to perish without making 

 any provision for a continuance of their species, and that their 

 perpetuity should every year be left to such a mere accident as a 

 few individuals casually belated in coming to maturity, would be 

 an anomaly Wholly unlike anything which we meet with else- 

 where in this department of nature's works. And Dr. E. Sanborn 

 of Andover, Mass., in several communications published in the 

 Boston Cultivator and Cambridge Chronicle in 1849 and 1850, 

 gives it as the result of a series of observations which he had made 

 upon the larvae, that at no season of the year do they remain 

 longer than six weeks in the ground, and that neither they nor 

 the perfect insects lie under the ground during the winter. Dr. 

 Harris hence infers, in the last edition of his Treatise, that those 

 beetles which come out the latter part of summer lurk in some 

 place not yet discovered, during the winter, to come abroad again 

 in the S23ring and deposit their eggs in the fruit. 



