COLEOPTERA. G3 



describes the depredations of these insects, in his account* of the 

 ivory-billed wood-pecker, in the following words. " Would it be 

 believed that the larvae of an insect, or fly, no larger than a grain 

 of rice, should silently, and in one season, destroy some thousand 

 acres of pine trees, many of them from two to three feet in diam- 

 eter, and a hundred and fifty feet high ! Yet whoever passes along 

 the high road from Georgetown to Charleston, in South Carolina, 

 about twenty miles from the former place, can have striking and 

 melancholy proofs of the fact. In some places the whole woods, 

 as far as you can see around you, are dead, stripped of the bark, 

 their wintry-looking arms and bare trunks bleaching in the sun, 

 and tumbling in ruins before every blast, presenting a frightful 

 picture of desolation. Until some effectual preventive or more 

 complete remedy can be devised against these insects, and their 

 larvae, I would humbly suggest the propriety of protecting, and 

 receiving with proper feelings of gratitude, the services of this and 

 the whole tribe of wood-peckers, letting the odium of guilt fall to 

 its proper owners." Some years ago Mr. Nuttall kindly procured 

 for me, near the place above mentioned, specimens of the destruc- 

 tive insects referred to by Wilson. They were of three kinds. 

 Those in greatest abundance were the Pales weevil. One of the 

 others was a larger, darker-colored weevil, without white spots on 

 it, and named Hylobius picivorus, by Germar and Schonherr, or 

 the pitch-eating weevil; it is seldom found in Massachusetts. 

 The third was the white pine weevil to be next described. It is 

 said that these beetles puncture the buds and the tender bark of 

 the small branches, and feed upon the juice, and that the young 

 shoots are often so much injured by them as to die and break off 

 at the wounded part. But it is in the larva state that they are 

 found to be most hurtful to the pines. The larva? live under the 

 bark, devouring its soft inner surface, and the tender newly 

 formed wood. When they abound, as they do in some of our 

 pine forests, they separate large pieces of bark from the wood be- 

 neath, in consequence of which the part perishes, and the tree 

 itself soon languishes and dies. 



The white pine weevil, Rhynchcenus (Pissodes) Strobi-[, of 



* American Ornithology. Vol. IV. p. 21. 

 t Pissodes nemorcnsis of Germar. 



