222 PALMER WORM ORIGIN OF ITS NAME. 



provinces, which eat the leaves from the trees. They are innu- 

 merable in some years. In the intervals there are but few of 

 them : but when they come, they strip the trees so entirely of 

 their leaves, that the woods in the middle of summer are as 

 naked as in winter. ^They eat all kinds of leaves, and very few 

 trees are left untouched by them; as, about that time of the 

 year the heat is most excessive. The stripping the trees of their 

 leaves has this fatal consequence, that + hey cannot withstand the 

 heat, but dry up entirely. In this manner, great forests are 

 sometimes entirely ruined. The Swedes who live here showed 

 me, here and there great tracts in the woods, where young trees 

 were now growing, instead of the old ones, which, some years 

 ago, had been destroyed by the caterpillars. These caterpillars 

 afterwards change into moths, or phalence." 



If our western prairies were ever covered with wood it is most 

 probably by this insect that they were first made naked, those 

 trees only surviving the attack which grew upon the bottom 

 lands along streams, where the drouth of mid-summer would be 

 less felt than upon the uplands. 



In the year 1791 , the orchards and forests of New England were 

 overrun by this worm, and the leaves of the apple, oak and 

 other trees were devoured by it. It was at this time that it re- 

 ceived the name "palmer worm" by which it has since been cur- 

 rently designated. This name was evidently derived from our 

 English translation of the sacred scriptures. Another insect 

 which a month or two before had devastated the fruit trees to 

 an extent never previously known, appears simultaneously to 

 have received the name which it still retains, the canker worm; 

 for previous to this date we find this name given to what is now 

 called the army worm. Many persons at that time, we doubt not, 

 supposed them to be the very insects to which the inspired pro- 

 phet alluded. Two years before, a clergyman who, from some 

 remarkable phenomena which had just then occurred, had formed 

 the opinion that the arm of the Lord was extended in wrath over 

 our laud, had written a discourse, in which it was predicted that 

 great calamities were soon to happen. And the advent at that 

 time of one of these strange insects immediately after the other, 

 in such countless numbers all over the country, 'the palmer worm 



