405 



ing together of tlie pillow tliey gradually vrork themselves into the 

 cloth covering in which they are held by their microscopic retrorse ser- 

 rations. To one who looks at a tine specimen of this accidental felting 

 there can not fail to come the suggestion that feathers could be com- 

 mercially used in this way. The matter has been occasionally referred 

 to in print, notably in the American Naturalist for December, 1882, and 

 in Insect Life, Vol. II, pp. 317-.'U8. 



DAMAGE TO CARNATIONS BY THE VARIEGATED CUT-WO£tM. 



According to the American Florist of February 25, Mr, Edwin Lons- 

 dale read a paper before the then recent meeting of the American Car- 

 nati(m Society, in which he described an interesting case of damage in 

 a hothouse to the buds of carnations. The damage was done by the 

 half- grown larvoe of Aryrotis Haucia. Four or five hundred buds were 

 destroyed in one house in less than a mouth. By spraying with Paris 

 green and by i^ersistent search for the larvse at night further damage 

 was averted. 



This is evidently another case of an introduction of cut-worms into 

 a hothouse with new soil in the fall. It is a matter of great importance 

 that new soil brought into hothouses should either be sterilized or that 

 it should be procured in spring and left in heaps from which all vege- 

 tation should be carefully removed throughout the entire summer. By 

 fall all cut- worms will have deserted the heaps and the earth can then 

 be safely used. An instance of an almost precisely similar character 

 has been brought to our knowledge near Washington and the source of 

 infestation was clearly traced to earth taken in the fall from beneath 

 sod in a pasture field which was badly infested with cut-worms. 



A LARCH ENEMY. 



In one of JMr. John G. Jack's interesting series of articles, entitled 

 "Notes of a Summer Journey in Europe" [Garden and Forest, Feb- 

 ruary 24, 1892, p. 87), he writes from Berlin that the European Larch 

 is sometimes seriously injured and often killed by the larva of a lit- 

 tle moth {Coleophora lariceUa), which eats out all the interior of the 

 leaves, leaving only the dry, hard, shriveled epidermis. The intro- 

 duced Japanese Larch, however, is not affected by the pest. Accord- 

 ing to Mr. Jack this same insect has been introduced into Massachu- 

 setts for a number of years, and its ravages have been sometimes quite 

 noticeable in the Arnold arboretum. The Japanese Larch is also immune 

 in tliis country. 



HESSIAN FLY IN NEW ZEALAND 



As we reported in Vol. i of Insect Life, the Hessian Fly was first 

 authentically determined as occurring in New Zealand in 1888. The 

 locality in which it occurred was at that time somewhat restricted, but 



