14 



but those of this Curculio. Mr. C. H. Murray, of Clay City, South 

 Illinois, writes in the Neiv York Tribune of October 29, 1867, that 

 "last year nearly all of the wild grapes of that region were stung by 

 some kind of a fly, and at the time of ripenings contained a small 

 worm." "This year," he adds, "there are no wild grapes, but the tame 

 grapes have been stung. Some fell off, others remained until the 

 time of ripening, and contained a bluish white worm, about one- 

 fourth of an inch long. Whole bunches of the grapes were thus de- 

 stroyed, and often every bunch on a vine." Mr, Christ. S. Jackson, 

 of Danville, Kentucky, sent me on July 31, 1867, a large bottle of 

 grapes punctured by this same larva, and some of them still contain- 

 ing the defunct body of the offender. As, however, these grapes were 

 preserved in alcohol, they only enabled me to identify the species, and 

 were useless for the purpose of rearing the perfect beetle. The grapes 

 forwarded by this gentleman were Catawbas, obtained from vineyards 

 at Big Hill, Kentucky,"where,"as he adds, "there are sixteen acres 

 IN one place entirely ruined by this insect."' Mr. M. C. Read, 

 of Hudson, Ohio, has manifestly, as is proved by a letter of his to me, 

 ha'd his grapes infested for the last three years by this very same larva, 

 though in endeavoring to trace out its Natural History, he has ap- 

 parently — by a very pardonable oversight in one who is not a profes- 

 sional entomologist — confounded it with one of the leaf -rolling cater- 

 pillars of the grape-vine; which last produce, in the perfect state, not 

 a Beetle, but a Moth or "Miller," as it is popularly called. "When 

 my grapes are ripe," so he tells me, "I am compelled to carefully look 

 over every bunch, and pick out the infested berries, before sending 

 them to the table; and out of the eighteen or twenty insects that I 

 have found on the grape, this one gives me the most anxiety. For a 

 slight increase in its numbers would render our grape crop worthless." 

 Finally, my esteemed correspondent, Mr. Joseph Wood, of Marietta, 

 Ohio, informed mo last summer that he had "every year hundreds of 

 thousands of grapes punctured by some insect, and afterwards found 

 the larva eating the grape." He subsequently sent me on July 27th, 

 3867, a box containing a few punctured grapes, two of which had 

 respectively a living and a dead larva in them. Upon examining these 

 larvae, I was satisfied that they were those of some species or other of 

 Snout-bettle, but that they were decidedly distinct from those of either 

 of the two species — the Plum Curculio and the Plum gouger* — known 

 to infest the plum, with which Mr. Wood had in the first instance 

 confounded them. I therefore wrote at once to him, stating the 



*Kespecting these two, see below, Chapters XI. and XII. 



