120 
Nature and Extent oe the Injury. 
Under a badly infested tree, hundreds of fallen twigs, bearing 
four to six leaves each, may be found in May and June. Sometimes 
twigs are cut off not more than a half or three quarters of an inch 
long, each bearing only a single leaf; and occasionally those ampu- 
tated are a foot long, with a dozen leaves or more. 
When the beetles become superabundant, a female frequently 
girdles the stub of a twig below the point where an egg has been 
previously placed by another beetle, thus causing the part contain- 
ing the first egg, or the young larva hatching from it, to fall to the 
ground. She then places her own egg in this second stub. Five 
per cent, of the twigs collected May 29, 1903, had been used a sec- 
ond time in this manner. Later in the season these amputations 
were sometimes repeated five or six times on the same twig. 
If the tree is very heavily attacked, the fallen leaves may nearly 
cover the ground in early June. Under eighteen trees in the city 
square of Decatur, there were picked up on the 7th and 8th of June, 
1905, 11,986 twigs, measuring six Imshels when closely packed. 
Seven hundred were collected beneatli one tree on the 4th of June. 
The effect on the trees is to destroy the young twigs put forth 
prior to the middle of June, and this injury, continuing year after 
year, results in bunches of dead stubs distributed all through the 
top. The trees become stunted, scraggy, and misshapen, with the 
leaves growing in tufts on the larger limbs. The younger trees lose 
their spreading habit, and grow upright with narrow ragged tops. 
The larger ones are less affected, but are injured in appearance by 
the loss of foliage, and by clusters of dead stubbed twigs seen every- 
where through the tops. A tree in Central Park, about forty feet 
high, had been so seriously injured in 1904 that by May 3 of the 
following year only a few leaves had appeared, although uninjured 
elms were thickly covered with half-grow'n foliage. Large branches 
of this tree, which had previously sent out many clusters of sec- 
ondary twigs, were now dead. On one branch, about the thickness 
of a finger, killed by girdlers the preceding year, nineteen truncated 
stubs were counted within a length of fourteen inches. Another 
tree, thirty-five feet high, was so injured that it would probably die 
before another season. Only a few leaves had appeared by the 5th 
of Alay, and these w-ere in the center and at the top. 
In Decatur, where this insect was first discovered and has been 
chiefly studied by us, the elms of the greater part of the city were 
infested in 1905, as was shown by a general survey made by Mr. 
Taylor in May and June. The infestation had not yet reached Fair- 
