562 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



year woulcT but add to its growth and utility, as many of tlie old errors could 

 very readily be rectified by constantly havinjj^ reliable specimens at hand to cor- 

 rect mistakes in nomenclature or popular prejudice. 



As the articles on entomology, in the former agricultural reports, have given 

 such full and lucid descriptions of the habits, form, and color of several of the 

 insects injurious to the farmer that the most noxious of them can readily be 

 identified, it has been thought of more consequence to devote a few pages in 

 the present report to a general description of the habits and instincts of 

 those most destructive and best known, with a short tabular view of their 

 arrangement, classification, and the various metamorphoses or changes of form 

 they undergo before attaining the perfect or winged state, and the methods 

 already employed to destroy them, or, at least, to diminish their numbers. In 

 order to do this, the best of our American authorities on the subject, viz.. Dr. 

 Harris and Dr. Fitch, and various foreign authors, Mr. Curtis, 'Kollar, and 

 others, have been consulted, and extracts have been taken from the leading 

 agricultural papers and journals as to the success or failure of experiments 

 already made by well-known and reliable farmers and horticulturists. It is not, 

 indeed, expected that a practical farmer can spare the time to study the anatom- 

 ical structure of an insect, or its scientific nomenclature ; but it is certainly of 

 the greatest consequence for him to know the peculiar habits and transformations 

 of any particular insect destroying his crops, as it may be very easy for him to 

 kill it in one of the three stages of its existence, and almost, if not quite, impos- 

 sible in the other two. We will take, for example, the female moth, miller, or 

 candle-fly, as it is commonly termed ; this can be readily crushed with one blow 

 in a second of time, whilst it would take hours of searching to find the hundreds 

 of mischievous caterpillars which emerge from the eggs she will, if undisturbed, 

 deposit iipon the leaves of culinary vegetables from one end of the garden or 

 field to the other. 



Again : all insects must not be considered as injurious to the farmer, some of 

 them being, on the contrary, highly beneficial, as j)reying upon the noxious 

 insects themselves, waging a war of extermination npon them at all times ; for 

 instance, the common ladybugs, so-called, (with the exception of a large one 

 found on squash and melon vines,) in both their larva and perfect state, live 

 almost entirely upon the myriads of plant lice which infest and overrun our 

 oats, vegetables, and young fruit trees. It will also be necessary to give a 

 brief sketch of the diflerent orders into which insects are divided for the benefit 

 of such farmers as have not read the former reports. The same remedy which 

 would act for a beetle, would not be of tlie least service when applied for a moth 

 or miller, their structure and habits being entirely dissimilar. The following 

 classification has, therefore, been made or compiled merely for the use of young 

 farmers, and is not intended to interfere with any former classification made by 

 scientific entomologists having the works of the various authors who have de- 

 voted their whole time to the subject, but is merely given in order to enable 

 working farmers readily to classify and describe any of the various insects which 

 daily come under their observation, and, when writing, to call them by their 

 proper names. Beetles, wasps, flies, or, indeed, almost anything that either 

 crawls or flies, bites or stings, are now included under the common name of bug, 

 which, if properly used, sh6uld be applied to one order of insects alone. 



All true insects have six legs, and the mouth is provided with either jaws for 

 biting, or a trunk or proboscis for piercing and sucking ; so that here we have 

 the first great division, namely, biting insects with jaws, or sucking insects with 

 a trunk or piercer. The bees and wasps form a connecting link between the 

 true biting insects which possess jaAvs, and the sucking insects which have 

 merely a sucker or piercer, being provided with both jaws, which they use to 

 bite and tear the materials with Avhich they construct their habitations, and a 

 ligula or tongue Avhich is employed to suck up their liquid nourishment. The 



