474 INSECTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. 



and in " The Cultivator," some of them written by the late 

 Judge Buel, by whom, as well as by the editors of " The 

 Yankee Farmer," rewards were offered for the discovery of 

 the means to prevent its ravages. Premiums have also been 

 proposed, for the same end, by the " Kennebec County Agri- 

 cultural Society," in Maine, which were followed by the pub- 

 lication, in " The Maine Farmer," of three " Essays on the 

 Grain Worm," presented to that Society. These essays were 

 reprinted in the seventeenth volume of the "New England 

 Farmer," wherein, as well as in some other volumes of the 

 same work, several other articles on this insect may be found. 

 From these sources, and, more especially, from some interest- 

 ing letters wherewith I was favored in the years 1838 and 

 1841, by Mrs, N. G. Gage, formerly of Hopkinton, New 

 Hampshire, the history of the wheat-fly in America, published 

 in the first edition of this work, was chiefly derived. It will 

 be found to contain a circumstantial relation of the moulting 

 of the maggot, a process which hitherto does not appear to 

 have been understood in Europe, and which later writers on 

 the history of the wheat-fly in this country have failed to de- 

 scribe. Personal observations on this insect in Maine and 

 New Hampshire, and in the western parts of Massachusetts 

 and of Connecticut, together with information gathered there 

 from intelligent farmers, confirm the general correctness of my 

 former statements, and enable me to add thereto some further 

 particulars. 



The American wheat-insect, which I have seen alive, in its 

 winged form, in Maine and in New Hampshire, and which I 

 have also reared from the larva, agrees exactly with the de- 

 scriptions and figures of the European wheat-fly, or Cecidomyia 

 Triiici of Mr. Kirby. It is a very small orange-colored gnat, 

 with long, slender, pale-yellow legs, and two transparent wings, 

 reflecting the tints of the rainbow, and fringed with delicate 

 hairs. Its eyes are black and prominent. Its face and feelers 

 are yellow. Its antennae are long and blackish. Those of the 

 male are twice as long as the body, and consist of twenty-four 

 joints, which, excepting the two basal ones, are globular, sur- 



