﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 51 



companies, they alighted in particular spots, and there dropped their eggs ; and the 

 result is sufficiently well known. 



More briefly expressed my view is this : a dry season and dry swamps multiplies 

 this insect. And when it is thus multiphed, a wet season and overflowed swamps 

 drives it out from its lurking place [2] in flocks, alighting here and there over the coun- 

 try. But on being thus rusticated, it finds our arable lands too dry for it; and immedi- 

 ately on maturing and getting its wings again, it flies back to the swamps, whereby it 

 happens that we see no more of it. 



[1] It stands to reason that if the insect were drowned out by 

 overflowed swamps, a wet season, instead of being favorable to its 

 wide dispersion, would check its increase and almost annihilate it : 

 what is meant is, doubtless, that the moth is driven out of the over- 

 flowed swamps. 



f 2] This necessarily implies that the moths either issue in the Fall, 

 and winter over, or else in the Spring before the rains have overflowed 

 the low places ; for if the overflow take place while yet the pupae are 

 in the ground or after the eggs are laid or the worms hatched, it must 

 needs prove detrimental by drowning them out. Thus, to state the 

 explanation more explicitly, the conditions most favorable to the 

 widespread appearance of the Army Worm in our cultivated fields 

 and meadows are one or more dry seasons that will permit it to multi- 

 ply in swampy places that are ordinarily overflowed, followed by a 

 wet Spring in which the rains are not copious enough to overflow such 

 places until the bulk of the moths have issued, and which soon after- 

 wards are copious enough to overflow the low lands and oblige the 

 moths — both those issuing in the Fall and in Spring — to lay their eggs 

 on higher land which they ordinarily would not prefer. 



The insect is with us every year and often attracts considerable 

 attention in restricted localities the year preceding its more general 

 advent. I have reared the moths from the worms on three difl"erent 

 occasions since the last general appearance of the species in the 

 West in 1869. 



In the normal cut- worm-like condition they easily escape the eyes 

 of man; but when the bulk of them have passed through the last 

 molt, or, in other words, are nearly full-grown, and have stripped the 

 fields in which they were born, they are then obliged to migrate in 

 bodies to new pastures. Thus assembled and exposed, they pass 

 through grass and grain-fields, devouring as they go ; for they are now 

 exceedingly voracious, and, like most Lepidopterous larvae, consume 

 more during the last few days of worm-life than during all the rest of 

 their existence. The farmer who is unfamiliar with their life-habits 

 wonders where they come from so suddenly, and presently, when they 

 enter the earth to transform, he wonders again where they go to. In 

 these exposed numbers, also, the numerous natural enemies of the 

 worms congregate about them and do their murderous work far more 



