vai bern Cr BUG. 
Few insects, and certainly no other species of the natural order to 
which this one belongs, have caused such enormous pecuniary losses as 
has the chinch bug, Blissus leucopterus Say. No other insect native to 
the Western Hemisphere has spread its devastating hordes over a 
wider area of country with more fatal effects to the staple grains of 
North America than has this one. But for the extreme susceptibility 
of the very young to destruction by drenching rains and to the less 
though not insignificant destructiveness during rainy seasons of the 
parasitic fungus, Sporotrichum globuliferum Speg., on both the adults 
and young, the practice of raising grain year after year on the same 
areas, as followed in the United States, would become altogether un- 
profitable. Some of this insect’s own habits, emphasizing as they do 
the effects of meteorological conditions, are the most potent influences 
that serve to hold it within bounds, by giving its tendency to exces- 
sive increase a decidedly spasmodic character. 
DISTRIBUTION. 
The genus Blissus is widely distributed over the world, occurring in 
South Africa, Abyssinia, Algeria, Sicilia, southern Europe, northward 
at least to the sand dunes of central and northern Hungary, India, 
Japan, southern Russia, and in the Western Hemisphere in Buenos 
Aires, and from Panama and the Island of St. Vincent northward 
to middle California on the Pacific coast and Cape Breton on the 
Atlantic. When we come to understand that the Hemiptera of the 
world are far from being well known, and the faunas of South 
America and central Africa have as yet been hardly studied at all, 
we may well presume that future studies of the hemipterous insects 
of these countries may unite some of the different areas now known 
to be inhabited by the several species of this genus. 
At present in the Old World this genus may be said to occur in the 
Ethiopian, Oriental, and Palearctic life regions; while in the New 
World it ranges from the Neotropical region at Panama and St. 
Vincent into the Nearctic over the borders of the Boreal subregion in ~ 
British America. 
Our American species, Blissus leucopterus Say, the only one of the 
genus at present known in the Western Hemisphere, has been recorded 
from St. Vincent and Grenada, West Indies, by Uhler; Cuba, by Stal: 
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