THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 31 



BOGUS CHINCH BUGS. 



Few things are more astonishing than the acuteness of perception 

 superinduced by being constantly conversant with some one particu- 

 lar subject. I have often been surprised at the readiness with which 

 nurserymen will distinguish between different varieties of Apple, 

 even in the dead of the year, when there are no leaves, and of course 

 no fruit on their nursery trees. In the same way old practiced shep- 

 herds can recognize every individual sheep out of a large flock, 

 though, to the eyes of a common observer, all the sheep look alike. 

 Experienced grain-growers, again, can distinguish at a glance between 

 twenty different varieties of wheat, which the best botanist in the 

 country would fail to tell one from the other; and I have been in- 

 formed that a miller of many years' standing, as soon as he has shoul- 

 dered a sack of wheat, knows at once whether it is spring grain or 

 fall grain ; while ninety-nine entomologists out of every hundred 

 would probably be unable, on the most careful inspection, to tell the 

 difference between the two, and some might even mistake wheat 

 for rye. 



It is not surprising, therefore, that persons who have paid no par- 

 ticular attention to the study of insects, often confound together in- 

 sects which, in the eyes of the professed entomologist, look as differ- 

 ent from each other as a horse does from a cow or a hog. It would, 

 indeed, be little short of miraculous if this were not so ; for there are 

 about thirty thousand distinct species of insects to be found within 

 the limits of the United States, and of course in such a vast multipli- 

 city, there must be many strong resemblances. 



I will therefore conclude this article on the Chinch Bug, by 

 briefly mentioning several true Bugs, belonging to the same Order of 

 Half-winged Bugs (Heteroptera), as that pestilent little foe of the 

 farmer, and which I know to be frequently mistaken for it. The 

 reader will then, by comparing the different figures, see at once how 

 widely they all differ, and by a very little practice, his eyes will be- 

 come so well educated that he will soon, without any artificial assist- 

 ance from glasses, be able to distinguish the creatures one from the 

 other, as they crawl or fly about in the almost microscopic dimensions 

 assigned to them by their Great Creator. 



One reason, perhaps, why so many different bugs are popularly 

 confounded with the Chinch Bug, is the similarity of their smell. 

 Everybody is aware that Chinch Bugs possess the same peculiarly 

 unsavory odor as the common Bed Bug; and hence when a person 

 finds a small insect that has this obnoxious smell, he is very apt to 

 jump to the conclusion that it must be a Chinch Bug. No mode of 

 reasoning, however, can be more unsafe or unsound. There are hun- 

 dreds, of different species of Half-winged Bugs — the common brown 

 Squash Bug (Coreus tristis) for example — that possess this peculiar 

 smell; and what is stranger still, although this smell is more usually 



