﻿EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT 



Judging from the mass of accounts, the first brood was very generally 

 neglected by those who had not before had experience with the in- 

 sect, and not till the more numerous second brood appeared did the 

 farmers awake to the importance of action, and, as far as possible, con- 

 certed action. Much injury was consequently done. 



Later in the season the beetle at times swarmed in and about the 

 large cities, and was commonly seen flying in the streets of Philadel- 

 phia and New York, as in past years it had been seen in those of St. 

 Louis. Mr. J. J. Dean of New York, after referring to its frequency 

 in the streets of Brooklyn, gives me the loUowing interesting account 

 of its occurrence on Coney Island. 



On the 14th of September I picki'd up the enclosed specimen at Coney Island. The 

 beach for miles was covered with them — ;he hummocks and sand-hills which comprise 

 the greater pnrt of the island were literally alive witii them. In the towns of Flatt)ush 

 and Gravesend, both situated in King's Co. — the latter town inchulinjr Coney Island 

 within its boundaries — the ravages of this instct have been very serious. The Egti;-plant 

 seems to have alforded him his favorite article of diet. I am however puzzhd by the 

 fact that so many millions of theni desert the ft-rtile fields of Flatbu>h and Gravesend 

 and steer for the barren acres of Coney Island, on which the principal vegetation is a 

 coarse sea grass which they do not seem to touch. They appear to have an irresistible 

 tendency to travel East anil are only stopped by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. 



In the Fall the' insect reached up into Vermont and extended 

 to within a i'ew miles of Boston,* but has not yet occurred in 

 Maine. 



ITS SCIENTIFIC NAME. 



In further support of the views expressed last year on this sub- 

 ject, I will add that an examination which I was permitted to make 

 last summer of the admirable and extensive collection of Uhrysome- 

 lidaB belonging to H. W. Bates, of London, shows that the tibial groove 

 on which Stal founds his new genus Leptinotarsa^ to which our potato 

 beetle is referred and under which it is published in Gemminger and 

 Harold's Catalogue, is reilly of no generic value. Several genuine 

 Doryphorne with the sternal spine fully developed have it in varying 

 degree, and in concatenata^ Fabr. it is even more conspicuous than in 

 V^-lineata- I fully agree with Dr. LeConte, that if any character has 

 value in separating IQlineata, it is the form of the palpi which ally 

 it more to Doryphora than to Chrynoiiiela^ and make ot it, with a few 

 others, a natural group in that genus., distinguished by peculiar colo- 

 ration and want of development of the sternal spine. 



* Mr. Geo H. Perkins, Prof, of Geology and Zoology iu the University of Vermont 'writes: "It 

 may interest j'ou to know that the Doryphora 10-lineala, the genuine animal, was found in the western 

 l)art of tliia State last August. I think it did not appear nuieh before, as I was on the look out for it." 

 Dr. Packard {Scientific Farmer, Feb. 1870) records its appearance at several jjlaces in Massachusetts. 



