OKTHOPTEEA OF INDIANA. 197 



"Tha CocJcroacJi. — These are very troublesome and destructive ver- 

 min, and are so numerous and voracious that it is impossible to keep 

 victuals of any kind from being devoured by them without close cov- 

 ering. They are flat, and so thin that few chests or boxes can exclude 

 them. They eat not only leather, parchment and woolen, but linen 

 and paper. They disappear in winter and appear most numerous in 

 the hottest days in summer. It is at night they commit their depreda- 

 tions, and bite people in their beds, especially children's fingers that 

 are greasy. They lay innumerable eggs, creeping into the holes of 

 old walls and rubbish, where they lie torpid all the winter. Some 

 have wings and others are without — perhaps of different sexes."* 



Catesby's wingless examples M^ere in all probability the young, as, 

 like most other insects, the wings are not acquired until the final 

 moult. Marlatt says that the "domesticity of the American roach 

 resulted from ages of association with the aborigines. It has now be- 

 come thoroughly cosmopolitan, and is unquestionably the most in- 

 jurious and annoying of the species occurring on vessels. It is some- 

 times numerous also in greenhouses, causing considerable injury to 

 tender plants. It is a notorious house pest, and occasionally vies with 

 the German roach in its injuries to book bindings. The backs, some- 

 times entirely, of both cloth and leather bound books, are eaten off 

 to get at the starchy paste used in the binding." 



The young of the American roach require about a year to reach 

 maturity. The rate of growth of it and other species depends, how- 

 ever, largely on the food and temperature conditions, and under unfa- 

 vorable circumstances the nymph stage is much prolonged. "The 

 abundance of roaches is, therefore, apparently not accounted for so 

 much by their rapidity of multiplication as by their unusual ability 

 to preserve themselves from ordinary means of destruction and by 

 the scarcity of natural enemies." 



Periplaneta AUSTRALASIA Fab. The Australian Roach. 



This species will doubtless be found to inhabit the State, as it has 

 been recorded from Florida, Nebraska and Minnesota. It is a little 

 smaller than P. americana, from which it can be separated by the 

 characters given in the key. Like the last two species, it inhabits 

 houses, and in the Southern States it is more abundant and trouble- 

 some than either of them. 



'Natural History, Carolina, 1748, Vol. 11, p. 10. 



