INSECTS INJURIOUS TO THE SPRUCE. IA 
striking northern harsh, wild scenery and frequent glimpses of Casco 
Bay, in former years greatly enhanced by riding through bits of deep 
dark spruce forests, has been not a little marred by the acres and even 
square milse of dead spruces which border the road, stripped of their 
dark sea-green foliage, reduced to skeletons, and presenting a ghastly, 
saddening, and depressing sight. And, indeed, judging from accounts, 
one may travel through the spruce forests of the coast from Portland to 
Rockland, and farther east to New Brunswick, and meet with similar 
sights. 
We visited late in August, in company with A. G. Tenney, esq., the 
farm of Mr. William Alexander, passing, before reaching the road lead- 
ing to his house, an area of several acres from which the spruce growth 
had been cut off in consequence of their widespread destruction by in- 
sects. Mr. Alexander informed us that the spruce trees were, in Lis 
opinion, killed by small caterpillars which have been at work for five 
years, but which were most destructive in 1879. These caterpillars he 
described as being the young of a small brown moth which laid its eggs 
in autumn; the eaterpillars hatching from them were not inch-worms, 
but when fully grown the body tapered towards both ends, and were 
about three-quarters of aninchlong. They were most destructive June 
20, when they are seen among the buds at the ends of the branches, 
where they drew the leaves together, eating the buds and not the leaves. 
He had also seen borers in the trees, but he thought the death of the 
tree should be attributed to the bud-worms, rather than to the borers. 
As will be seen further on, a number of caterpillars were found by us 
late this summer feeding upon the leaves of the spruce and fir, but the 
worm observed by Mr. Alexander was probably one of the leaf-rolling 
caterpillars, a species of the family Tortricide. A number of spruces 
and firs, with their leaves still on, but of a bright red, were observed 
seattered along the roadside; but no signs of leaf-worms or borers were 
observed in such trees, although the dead, leafless trees were infested 
with bark-borers. 
That the operations of borers and bark-beetles may be aided by cater- 
pillars in the buds as well as on the leaves seems also corroborated by 
observations in other localities. I was informed by C. J. Noyes, esq., of 
Brunswick, who is a summer resident at Mere point, that in June and 
the first week in July, 1878, the spruces and firs were attacked by great 
numbers of “little measuring worms, like the currant worm in shape,” 
which eat the buds at the ends of the branches; since 1878 they had 
mostly disappeared, and this summer (18381) he had noticed only four or 
five. i 
From Harpswell Neck we traced dead spruces and firs around to West 
Bath, where extensive forests had been destroyed and numbers of dead 
hemlocks were observed, while the wood was attacked and the bark 
undermined and perforated by Buprestid borers, bark-borers, and the 
pine-weevil (Pissodes strobi). We have nowhere seen hemlock trees, 
