124 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.84 



I should have stated earHer in this account of this insect, although 

 perhaps it has been inferred, that intense investigation of its biology 

 was begun at once and that it is one of the species that have been most 

 studied by careful workers. When Comstock found it in the Santa 

 Clara Valley of California he called it the pernicious scale. It is in 

 some ways unfortunate that it has come to be known popularly as the 

 San Jose scale. It was suspected for a time that James Lick brought 

 it in from Chile on apple twigs, and at another time that he brought 

 it from Japan. The question as to its origin was eventually settled by 

 Marlatt who studied it in Japan and decided that Japan got it from the 

 United States. He afterwards found it in China under such condi- 

 tions as to show that its original home was north China. Further than 

 that, he showed that in all probability James Lick imported it, possil^ly 

 through the missionary. Doctor Nevius, on the flowering Chinese 

 ])cach. Marlatt, in his wonderfully interesting account of his search 

 for the native home, concludes that the insect should be known as 

 the Chinese scale and that it came to this country on some ornamental 

 stock from north China. 



THE COTTON BOLL WEEVIL 



Seemingly unimportant things that are later connected with great 

 events are well worth recording. Back in 1843 ^ Swedish entomolo- 

 gist named and described, in Europe, a little weevil which had been 

 collected by some one in Vera Cruz, Mexico. The entomologist was 

 C. H. Boheman, and he called the weevil Anthonomus grandis. In 

 1871 a German entomologist named E. Sufifrian recorded the same 

 insect as occurring in Cuba. That is all that the world knew of this 

 famous insect down to 1880. In the latter year a very interesting man 

 named Dr. Edward Palmer, an Englishman' by birth and a profes- 

 sional botanical collector, who had traveled greatly in Mexico for the 

 United States Department of Agriculture and for Harvard University, 

 found that a small, dark-colored weevil was doing great damage to 

 cotton in the neighborhood of Monclova, Mexico. He sent specimens 

 of this weevil to the Department of Agriculture in Washington with 

 the statement that the insect had stopped the cultivation of cotton in 

 that part of Mexico. 



When Doctor Palmer's letter and six?cimens arrived in Washington 

 (the letter was addressed to the then Secretary of Agriculture, W. G. 

 Le Due), Professor Comstock was in California ; E. A. Schwarz, the 

 experienced beetle man was then working with the United States Ento- 

 mological Commission and not with the Department of Agriculture ; 

 and the writer, who knew very little about beetles, and to whom the cor- 



