1 38 ANNUAL REPORT. 



As an illustration of this point, it was discovered some years 

 ago that the ravages of the canker worm on the elm trees in one 

 of our eastern cities, might be easily prevented by encircling the 

 trunks with shallow tin troughs filled with oil, or by the applica- 

 tion of bandages smeared with tar or refuse molasses or any other 

 sticky substance. The philosophy of this remedy was, that the 

 female canker worm moth, having no wings, and coming out of 

 the ground was obliged to crawl up the trunk of the tree to reach 

 the twigs on which she naturally laid her eggs from which the 

 worms were hatched. As she ascended the tree therefore, she 

 would be obliged to cross the obstructions in her path, and would 

 either be drowned in the oil or stuck fast on the viscid bandages;, 

 in either case she would perish without accomplishing the object 

 of her life. This remedy had worked to satisfaction in the city 

 referred to for some years, when the elms in another eastern city 

 began to suffer serious defoliation. The "city fathers" of the latter, 

 having no knowledge of any insect on the elm but the canker worm, 

 put their city to considerable expense for oil troughs for the trees, 

 and when, season after season, the ravages of the pest showed n» 

 diminution, could not conceive why a remedy that worked so well in 

 one city should be absolutely useless in another. The riddle was 

 finally solved by an entomologist who explained that the damage 

 done in the last mentioned case, was not the work of canker worms, 

 but that of a leaf-feeding beetle Galeriica cahnariensis, Fabr., the 

 female of which has ample wings with which she could readih'- fly 

 from the ground into the branches of the tree and that she was not 

 in the least inconvenienced by the oil troughs that had been placed 

 for her destruction. So again the codling moth, the apple curculio 

 and the apple maggot, are all destructive to the fruit of the apple,^ 

 but the best methods for preventing the attacks of the first men- 

 tioned of these insects would be of no avail against the other two. 

 These instances show conclusively the value of a knowledge of the 

 differing forms and habits of differing species whose disastrous 

 work on fruit or foliage may be very similar. 



I am sorry to say that the study of entomology is still in its 

 earliest infancy among us. It is indeed surprising that this branch 

 of natural history should have so few votaries in a region so abound- 

 ing with striking and beautiful insect forms. It has not by any 

 means kept pace with its sister sciences of botany and ornithology^ 

 each of which have in our city alone, quite a number of excellent 

 Avorkers, 



