STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 487 



SUPPLEMENT. 



transparent, with a dusky margin and blackisli veins. Its width 



is one inch. 



215. Johnson's Cicindela, Cicindela Johnsonii, new species. (Ooleop- 



tera. Cicindelidae.) 



Several sjDecimens of a beautiful Cicindela met with in the 

 bufflilo trails upon the prairies west of Arkansas were sent me 

 several years since by W. S. Robertson. They are 0.50 to 0.58 

 long, bright green or blue, the wing covers broadly margined 

 exteriorly with white, from which margin projects inwardly a 

 medial tooth, the rounded anterior end of an apical lunule, and 

 the nearlv obsolete posterior end of a humeral lunule; mouth 

 white; antenna with the four basal joints green, the fifth tawny 

 yellow and the apical joints brown; beneath bright blue clothed 

 on each side of the breast and abdomen with dense white hairs; 

 legs green or purple, the shanks brownish yellow. I dedicate 

 this species to the Hon. B. P. Jolmson, Secretary of the State 

 Agricultural Society, and a prominent patron of the examination 

 of our insects now in progress, whose assistance extended in 

 various ways has been of much service in facilitating my 

 researches. 



NOTICE OF THE GIGANTIC LOCUSTS OF TROPICAL AMERICA. 



The late Lieut. Charles M. Van Rensselaer, first officer of the ill-fated 

 steamship Central America, "VVilliam X. Ilerndon commander, which vessel 

 foundered at sea September, 1857, with a loss of four hundred and twenty- 

 three lives, and bullion to the value of nearly a million and a quarter dollars, 

 when on the trip next preceding that sad catastrophe, gathered at Panama and 

 presented to the State Agricultural Society a number of specimens of a gigantic 

 grasshopper or locust which he had noticed as being common at the isthmus. 

 From the terms in which Lieut. Van Rensselaer is spoken of by those who 

 were well acquainted with him in .\lbany, the place of his nativity, I doubt 

 not it can truly be said that of the many noble, gallant spirits in the naval 

 service of our country, not one survives, more noble, more gallant than he. 

 Public attention was strongly directed to the devastations produced by insects 

 of this kind, the past season, in consequence of the accounts with which our 

 newspapers abounded, of the swarms of grasshoppers which threatened to lay 

 waste portions of the territory of Minnesota. And it was probably these ac- 

 counts wliich prompted Liout. V. R. to obtain these specimens, and thus show 

 to our citizens that other countries contain creatures of this kind which are 

 vastly more formidable than anything with which wc have to contend in our 

 own favored land. As the insects which are thus brought to our notice »rc 

 the largest of the many sj>ccics belonging to a group which in all ages of the 

 • world has stood pre-eminent for its destructivencss, it is but meet tliat tbo 



