226 



which he sent to the Smithsouian and received in exchange for it a 

 tew days after a check for $1,500, jjrobably had its origin in a state- 

 ment which we published over a year ago that the expedition to Aus- 

 tralia in search of Vedalia cost some $1,500; in otlier words, that 

 Vedalia might be called a tifteen-hundred-dollar insect. This curious 

 error is equaled by one which we have just noticed in a recent (New 

 York) paper, where the following statement is made: "It is esti- 

 mated that the cereal croj) of Canada lias been damaged fully 

 $38,000,000 by insects." This is a plain perversion of a statement 

 made by Mr. James Fletcher in his annual address as president of the 

 Association of Economic Entomologists, delivered at the meeting held 

 in Washington in August last, and which has received wide new^spajier 

 comment. Mr. Fletcher, however, said that one-tenth of the agricul- 

 tural product of the United States, namely, an amount of the value of 

 $380,000,000, is lost through insect ravages. By a very general error in 

 the first newspaper statements concerning this address, the amount was 

 placed at $38,000,000 instead of $380,000,000. Since then the fact that 

 Mr. Fletcher is Dominion Entomologist of Canada seems to have been 

 responsible for the mistake of transferring this loss fiom the United 

 States to Canada, while in some manner the damage, instead of apijly- 

 ing to the total agricultural product, has been restricted to the cereal 

 crop. This is a striking illustration of the worthlessness of many of 

 such uncredited statements in the newspapers and of the manner 

 in whi(;h newspaper ])aragraphs are sometimes evolved. 



A NOTE ON PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY. 



Mr. E. B. Poulton and Mr. W. H. Blandford brought out two inter- 

 esting points at the meeting of the Entomological Society of London, 

 June 3, 1891 (Trans. Ent. Soc. Loud., 1891, part 3, pp. xv-xvi). Mr. 

 Poulton announced that with the assistance of Prof. Meldola he had 

 ascertained that the hardened walls of the cocoons of Eriogaster lanes- 

 iris — the common small Eggar Moth of England — are produced not 

 by tightly woven silk alone, but by a loose and open framework of silk, 

 over which a paste of calcium oxalate is poured from the malpighian 

 tubules and also probably from the anus. Mature larvae were exhib- 

 ited, dissected so as to show that the malpighian tubules were injected 

 with a chalky secretion, the oxalate of lime. 



Mr. Blandford said that he had himself verified the statement that 

 uric acid can be detected in the malpighian tubules of insects, and Mr. 

 McLachlan agreed that the demonstration that these organs are renal 

 organs is now satisfactory. This discussion seems to us rather remark- 

 able, since, although the malpighian tubules were at first considered as 

 biliary in their function, the chemical determination of uric acid in these 

 organs was demonstrated in the case of Sericaria mori as early as 1816 

 by Brugnatelli and Wurzer. 



