(ia 
ments into a pulp and carry it away, but the little time I spant in 
observing them was insufficient to determine anything further re- 
specting their habits. Doubtless in this instance the leaves so 
consumed were used in the construction of suitable nests, in which 
to deposit the eggs and rear the young of those insects.” 
If this species should ever become seriously destructive (as is 
very unlikely), its injuries could probably be checked by the use of 
insect poison, since the time when it made the attack above de- 
scribed, was after the fruiting of the plant. 
THe Strawperry Fanse-Worm, (Mmphytus maculatus, Norton). 
[Plate V, Fig. 6.] 
Order Hlymenoprera. Family TENTHREDINID&. 
This insect, a green or yellowish slug-worm, which devours the 
leaves of the strawberry in midsummer, seems capable of mischief 
as serious as any attacking that plant; but it is removed from the 
first rank of strawberrry insects by the fact that it is evidently es- 
pecially subject to some undiscovered check upon its multiplication, 
which prevents its appearance in undue numbers, except at com- 
paratively rare intervals. As far as known, it has not usually oc- 
curred in destructive numbers for more than two years in succession 
in the same place. 
From any other strawberry caterpillar, it may be at once distin- 
guished by the number of its legs, which is twenty-two, including 
the three pairs of thoracic legs; while the true caterpillars of the 
Lepidoptera have never more than sixteen legs, all told. 
LITERATURE. 
This species was first described in 1861, from adult saw-flies cap- 
tured in Connecticut,* and again in the transactions of the Ameri- 
can Entomological Society for 1867 (p. 232), where its occurrence 
in Maine and New York also was reported; but nothing was known 
of its early stages, until six years later, when the larva was dis- 
covered in strawberry fields in Illinois and Iowa. Its life history 
was first published by Prof. Iuley in the Prairie farmer, of Chicago, 
for May 25, 1857, the article being illustrated by figures of all 
stages but the egg; and brief notes by the same author also appeared 
in the transactions of the State Horticultural Society of Llinois for 
that year. In the issue of the Prairie Farmer for June 22, 1867, 
mention is made of the occurrence of the larva on strawberries in 
Kastern Iowa and Central New York. 
Nearly two years after (January, 1869), the same writer repeated 
the substance of the preceding accounts in the American HKntomolo- 
gist; and notes upon it, drawn from the same sources, were also 
given in Packard’s Guide to the Study of Insects (1869), and in the 
Third Report of the Ontario Entomological Society (1872). In the 
Fourth Report of that Society, published the following year, the first 
appearance of this insect in the strawberry fields of Canada, was 
*Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, Vol. VIII, p. 157. 
