249 



passage of a larger quantity of liquid. The nozzle is shown entire at 

 a, and in section at 6 ; c is the removable cap, d the movable disk in 

 the upper chamber, and e the tangential inlet. This form of nozzle was 

 commended by the judges at the exposition of which we have previously 

 spoken, but in our practice we have found it much inferior to the stand- 

 ard Riley nozzle. 



{To be continued.) 



EARLY OCCURRENCE OF THE CHINCH BUG IN THE MISSISSIPPI 



VALLEY. 



By S. A. Forbes. 



The earliest record of the occurrence of the Chinch Bug in the valley 

 of the Mississippi does not antedate 1840, at which time this insect had 

 become sufficiently numerous in Tazewell County, on the Illinois River, 

 to attract attention. I was consequentl}^ peculiarly interested by in- 

 formation received last winter from W. T. Shelby, Esq., a police magis- 

 trate and notary public of Olney, 111., to the effect that he personally 

 remembered the destruction of a field of corn in 1828, on his father's 

 farm, opened up to cultivation about 181G, 7 miles north of Albion, the 

 county seat of Edwards County. 



Mr. Shelby has lately written me upon this point as follows : 



Cliincli Bugs appeartd in Edwards Couuty, 7 miles north of Albion, in 1828, the 

 year that Gen. Andrew Jackson was first elected President of the United States, and 

 the Whigs, in derision of the Democrats or Jackson men, dubbed them Jackson bugs. 

 I am not mistaken, as they almost destroyed afield of corn of my father's, the fodder 

 from which the stock did not like to eat. 



It is remarkable that an occurrence of such entomological interest 

 should have escaped the knowledge of Thomas Say, living at that time 

 at New Harmony, Ind., 25 miles away, and that his first specimen of 

 the Chinch Bug should have been obtained three years later from the 

 Atlantic coast. 



Since the above was written Mr. Shelby writes again : 



I have lately had a conversation with Mr. Elijah Nelson, who made a farm in 1820, 

 '2i miles west of where Olney now is, and he informs me that Chinch Bugs appeared 

 in the first crop of oats that was sown on that farm, as early as 1823, and that his 

 father told him that these w^ere the same kind of bugs that they had in old Virginia. 

 Mr. Nelson also tells me that in 1832 they appeared in considerable numbers and did 

 some damage to corn. 



Inquiry in the vicinity of the much older settlements of Illinois — 

 those along the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Kaskaskia — 

 gives me no hint of the early occurrence of any of the great farm pe&ts; 

 but this is probably due to the fact that the first farms were opened there 

 in the alluvial bottoms of the Mississippi and Kaskaskia Rivers, and 

 that no prairie lands were cultivated for very many years after the set- 

 tlements were established. 



