October, '09] JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 3I9 



that I have raked quarts of caterpillars off a tree. I have seen them 

 crawling in great numbers on the rails of the Medford branch track. 

 After a train had gone along the rails would be all green with their 

 crushed bodies." Another writes: ''Before public measures were 

 taken in the matter, the foliage was completely stripped from all the 

 trees in the eastern part of our town, presenting an awful picture of 

 devastation and promising in a short time to kill every tree and shrub 

 and all vegetation in any region visited by these creatures," which 

 shows how inadequate individual effort was to cope with the subject. 



The brown-tail moth, also scattered through the New England states, 

 well nigh rivals the gypsy riioth in destructiveness to vegetation and 

 because of its barbed hairs, which are poisonous, it makes itself the 

 more disagreeable of the two to human beings. One of the victims 

 writes: "We were shockingly poisoned by the caterpillars of the 

 brown-tail moth. They troubled us all summer. Every member of 

 my family was poisoned. At first we did not know what they were. 

 My little boy could not go near the insects without getting poisoned. 

 Ever}" time he went to pick cherries he would come down from the 

 tree badly poisoned. If my baby went near where they were his face 

 would break out into a rash. I was so dreadfully poisoned that I 

 thought I had some frightful disease. My hands, face and arms were 

 broken out with this rash. The caterpillars came into the house and 

 even into the closets. They would get on the clothes hanging on the 

 line and when these were worn they poisoned us." 



The codling worm of the apple causes a yearly loss of $10,000,000 

 to $15,000,000. The San Jose scale causes the death of millions of 

 fruit trees each year, and stored com in the seven Gulf States alone 

 is estimated to suffer damage from insects to the extent of $20,000,000. 

 The Texas fever tick, by discouraging the production of cattle in 

 nearly all of the southern states, has inflicted upon that section a loss 

 that can scarcely be calculated. When we run over the list of lesser 

 pests which exact their toll from our fields, pastures, orchards, gar- 

 dens, forests and herds, we can hardly consider as excessive the es- 

 timate that one tenth of the entire agricultural product of the coun- 

 try, or $300,000,000 per year, is contributed to the support of our 

 small but mighty foes. A few years ago the writer estimated that 

 the average Ohio farm of 88.5 acres suffers an average annual loss of 

 $93.12, the total annual loss for the 276,719 farms of the state being 

 $25,768,073.28, a sum which would support the Ohio Agricultural 

 Experiment Station on the basis of the expenditures for 1904 for 

 547 years; or by a similar computation it would sustain the Ohio 

 State University, the Ohio State Board of Agriculture and the Ohio 



