y8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.84 



the fact that these institutions are in a great and crowded city — the 

 largest in the world — and that no one is interested in agriculture 

 or in things that grow. He pointed out that the Entomological Society 

 of New York is small. However, I think that the Torrey Botanical 

 Club is a large society. Some one said to me that the teachers to 

 whom I was talking trained twelve thousand children. I remembered 

 that once, while I was talking at one of the summer sessions of the 

 Teachers College of New York. Doctor Caldwell told me that there 

 were twelve thousand teachers in attendance at this one summer 

 school. Think of the hundreds of thousands of pupils to be influenced 

 by this group of twelve thousand teachers ! And yet, I believe that 

 I was the only entomologist who ever addressed any part of that 

 group at New York. 



The Rocky Mountain Locust, or Western Grasshopper, 

 AND THE United States Entomological Commission 



While very great damage had been done in the United States by 

 the Hessian fly, the wheat midge, the chinch bug, army worms, the 

 plum curculio and other insects, and while the eastward march of the 

 Colorado potato beetle had for a time caused much alarm, nothing 

 attracted the attention of the j^eople in general and of the western 

 farmers in particular to the subject of possible insect damage to such 

 a marked degree as did the extraordinary incursions of the Rocky 

 Mountain locust, or western grasshopper, over the cultivated areas 

 of a number of the western States, including Kansas, Nebraska, 

 Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, a part of Missouri and other portions of 

 the trans-Mississippi in the years 1874 to 1876. 



Migratory grasshoppers had been occasionally reported in that 

 general region for many years, and in 1864 there were swarming 

 flights of these grasshoppers which did much damage and caused 

 considerable alarm. Other flights were noticed in the intervening 

 years between 1864 and 1874, but in the latter year the previous 

 experiences dwindled into insignificance ; growing crops in many 

 States were devoured, farms were abandoned, the trend of settlers 

 towards Kansas and neighboring States was stopped, and the direst 

 consequences were predicted. Even the eastern newspapers contained 

 startling accounts of the devastation. Thousands of people were said 

 to be starving. I was a college student at the time and was studying 

 grasshoppers with the aid of the recently published " Synopsis of the 

 Acridiidae," by Cyrus Thomas, and I well remember the excitement 

 that was created even in the little town in central New York, very 

 many hundreds of miles away from the devastated areas. 



