SO THE CHINCH BUG. 
would be annually destroyed by the prairie fires, thus eliminating 
whatever tendency there might be to perpetuate the brachypterous 
forms, and develop a fully winged more or less nomadic race which, 
as it slowly advanced inland, lost all vestige of its brachypterous 
ancestry, if such had existed.“ 
On the other hand, we might expect the shore-inhabiting in- 
dividuals to continue in their progress along the coast, the winged in- 
dividuals continually migrating inland, leaving a mixture of the two 
forms to push forward to the east coast of Florida—where as late as 
1906 it attacked grass on lawns about Palm Beach—and northward 
along the Atlantic to Cape Breton. As soon as this migration had 
passed the southern terminus of the Allegheny Mountains the inland 
spread would, very largely at least, be restricted to the area lying be- 
tween the eastern slope of these mountains and the coast, thus leav- 
ing the whole area to the west to be occupied by the northward tide 
of migration instead of that from the east. East of the Mississippi 
River and: south of the Ohio River the country is more heavily tim- 
bered and the prairies are lacking, so that forest fires would here 
take the place of prairie fires; but in the Southern States the woods 
are composed more largely of pine, and Doctor Lugger, in Minnesota, 
found that the chinch bug did not invade the region on which only 
pine and other Conifer grew, but that the more southern counties 
of his State, which are more or less wooded with deciduous trees, were 
invaded. He also called attention to the fact that before the country 
was settled by the whites these timbered lands were burned over fre- 
quently, probably annually, but now the wooded areas are confined to 
small tracts interspersed among the farms, and as these are not an- 
nually burned over they afford suitable shelters for the chinch bug 
during winter, and the grain fields of the farmer afford ample food 
during the summer, while on the prairies which are burned over such 
is not the case.? 
Along the eastern coast the chinch bug has never been especially 
destructive to the wheat crop north of North Carolina, where, accord- 
ing to Doctor Fitch,° the earliest depredations occurred in 1783, while 
Webster @ states that it threatened total destruction to the grain in 
1785; but since that time the ravages have not been nearly as severe as 
farther west in the Mississippi River Valley. In 1899, 1900, 1901, 
aProf. H. A. Morgan, then entomologist of the State Experiment Station of 
Louisiana, writing under date of May 30, 1898, states that he has never found 
the brachypterous form of chinch bug in that State, and the writer did not 
observe a single individual of these among the many macropterous specimens 
taken by himself in that State. 
do Virst Annual Report of the Entomologist of the State Experiment Station of 
the University of Minnesota, 1895, p. 26. 
-e Second Report on Noxious, Beneficial, and other Insects of New York, p- 278. 
@d Webster on Pestilence, Vol. I, p. 279. 
