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about a dozen green plums, which I had previously examined and 

 ascertained to be entirely free from punctures or cuts of any kind. 

 In a week's time, these plums were covered with just such punctures 

 as those already spoken of, some exhibiting as many as twenty of 

 them. None of these punctures contained a,ny egg, so far as I could 

 discover; and I repeatedly watched the insects through the glass as 

 they completed one hole, and tlien immediatly passed on and com- 

 menced another, Avithout making any attempt to deposit an egg in the 

 first. Possibly, however, these two Gougers might have been males, 

 or, if females, they might have already exhausted their stock of eggs, 

 or they might have refused to lay eggs except in such plums as were 

 actually growing on the tree. In not a single case, had either of 

 them made the large, open hemispherical excavation peculiar to the 

 Plum Curculio. Holes of the usual character, but bored simply for 

 food, occur also in very large numbers in the plums as they hang on 

 the trees. I have often, in the earlier part of the season, cut into 

 eighteen or twenty of them, before I could find either egg or larva, 

 or the boring-work of a larva ; and I have counted as many as nine of 

 them in a single f)lum, four only of which contained an egg. Later * 

 in the season, scarcely one hole out of fifty contains either egg or larva 

 or any signs of a larva. Almost universally from all these holes, for 

 whatever purpose they have been bored, there exudes a copious supply 

 of gum, as is also the case with the crescent-slit of the Plum Curculio. 

 As I have already shown in the Practical Entomologist, the new- 

 ly-hatched larva of the Plum Gouger, instead of burrowing, like that 

 of the Curculio, solely in the flesh of the plum, makes almost a straight 

 course for the kernel, through the shell of which, being as yet soft, 

 a passage is readily ojDened by it. Here it remains, feeding exclu- 

 sively upon the kernel, till it has acquired its full larval growth, when 

 it cuts the same smooth, round hole through the now quite hard shell 

 of the plum-stone that almost all boring-larvae make, in order to af- 

 ford a ready exit for the perfect insect. It then changes into the 

 pupa state inside the plum-stone; the plum itself not dropping in a 

 green state from the tree, as is almost invariably the case with plums 

 stung by the Curculio, but hanging on the tree and ripening prema- 

 turely. Subsequently, the pupa develops into the perfect Plum 

 Gouger, and the latter emerges through the hole already prepared for 

 it by the provident care of the larva. 



I suspect that I have rather over-estimated the destructive powers 

 of the Gouger, as compared with those of the Curculio. The punc- 

 tures, indeed, of the former are enormously abundant, out-numbering, 

 certainly, fourfold the crescent-slits and the gouging-work of the 



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