108 JOURXAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 4 



competent inspection of foreign nurserj^ stock and fruits has been 

 maintained by the state authorities. In a single year the quaran- 

 tine officer of San Francisco destroyed over three thousand trees and 

 plants infested with insects new to California, and much other stock 

 has been thoroughly fumigated before it has been admitted. During 

 these twenty years a great many dangerous importations of insects 

 and diseases have been detected and stopped at the port of San Fran- 

 cisco, to the enormous gain of the fruit interests of California and, 

 indirectly, of the whole country. 



FOREIGN ORIGIN OF MANY OF OUR INSECT PESTS 



Fully fifty per cent, of the important injurious insect pests in this 

 country are of foreign origin. Among these are the codling moth, 

 the Hessian fly, the asparagus beetles, the hop-plant louse, the cab- 

 bage worm, the wheat-plant louse, oyster-shell bark louse, pea weevil, 

 the croton bug, the angoumois grain moth, and the horn ^y of 

 cattle, and, in comparatively recent years, such very important pests 

 as the cotton boll weevil, the San Jose scale, and the gypsy and brown- 

 tail moths. Many, if not all, of these pests, and others not mentioned, 

 could have been kept out or their spread much checked if proper 

 quarantine legislation had been available, and the saving to this 

 country would have been enormous. 



While it is true that certain classes of injurious insect pests, such as 

 the house fly and other household insects, and other insects which 

 may be similarly carried in ships' cargoes or in the packing of merchan- 

 dise, have been imported, and still will be, in spite of any quaran- 

 tine law, however rigid; it is equally true that the great mass of the 

 foreign insect enemies of orchards and forests have come in on nursery 

 and ornamental stock, and might have been kept out, in large meas- 

 ure, if an efficient quarantine law had been in operation. 



Taking up a few of the insects just mentioned, the codling moth 

 now costs, in loss and cost of treatment of trees, 816,000,000 annually; 

 the San Jose scale, similarly in loss and cost of treatment of trees, 

 $10,000,000 a 3'ear; the Hessian fl}- probablj' causes an annual loss 

 of $50,000,000, and in some years this loss has reached the enormous 

 total of $100,000,000. The loss chargeable to the boll weevil, from 

 the very conservative estimate of oMr. AV. D. Hunter, amounts to 

 aljout $25,000,000 a year. 



The gypsy moth and brown-tail moth in Massachusetts and por- 

 tions of other New England States are now costing those states, in ex- 

 penditures merely in efforts at control, not counting damage at all, up- 

 ward of a million dollars a year. In addition to this, the National 

 Government is appropriating $300,000 a year to aid in controlling 



