The law authorizing the appointment of a State Entomologisst 

 makes it one of his duties to prepare an Annual Eeport of his re- 

 searches and discoveries, for publication by the State. Under existing 

 circumstances, I have thought that the most appropriate mode of 

 carrying out the spirit, though not the letter, of the law upon this 

 point was to offer this my First Annual Eeport for Publication in the 

 Transactions of your Society. 



In preparing this document, I have aimed to use only such lan- 

 guage, as will be intelligible to any one who has had a good Common 

 School education, with one single exception. I have throughout, after 

 giving the English names of insects, added the scientific names, 

 printed in italics and enclosed in a parenthesis ( ). The general 

 reader will find the sense alwa3's complete without the parenthesis in 

 italics; and therefore all that he has to do, in order to avoid those 

 technical names which are so distasteful to many, is to skip over en- 

 tirely, as he reads on, every parenthesis (printed in italics). To the 

 scientific reader the scientific names are absolutely essential, because 

 they are part and parcel of the peculiar language in which he writes 

 and speaks and thinks; and because, while the scientific names are 

 intelligible to every man of science, no matter whether he resides in 

 America, in England, in France, or in Germany, and are the same 

 everywhere throughout the whole civilized world, the English names 

 of insects are often local, and differently employed by different writers 

 and different States. For example : — a minute, two-winged Fly, the 

 orange-colored larva of which infests the ears of wheat in the field 

 a little before harvest, and which is called in English throughout New 

 York and- New England "the Wheat Midge" {Cecidomyia tritici, 

 Kirby), is called pretty generally out West "the Eed Weevil" and of- 

 ten simply "the Weevil," and in Pennsylvania and Maryland is pop- 

 ularly known as "the Milk Weevil." Now, if I have occasion to talk 

 of this insect, and call it, after the fashion of most of our Illinois 

 farmers, "the Eed Weevil" or simply "the Weevil," every foreign 

 entomologist, being entirely unacquainted with our local terms, will 

 suppose that I am speaking of some kind of Snout beetle, and probably 

 of that particular little black species {Sitophilus granarius, Linnaeus), 

 which infests such wheat as is stored in granaries both in this country 

 and in Europe, and is popularly known in England as "the Weevil." 

 But if, on the other hand, I give our popular Illinois name, or the 

 English name used in Pennsylvania, or that used in New York and 

 New England, and add in innocent little parenthesis — -I^^^ (printed 

 in italics) — the three words that form its complete scientific designa- 

 tion, then every entomologist, from one end of the world to the other. 



