﻿58 EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT 



Setting: aside possible but not probable injury from a new invasion, we may con- 

 sider the r)robable injury that will result in 1S75, from the progeny of those which came 

 in 1874. The eggs which are deposited on southerly liill-sides often hatch before cold 

 weather sets in, if the Fall be warm and protracted, while many hatch soon after the 

 frost is out of the ground in the Spring. Yet the great bulk of them will not hatch 

 till into April. That most of the eggs will hatch may be taken for granted unless we 

 have very abnormal climatic conditions, and unprecedentedly wet and cold weather 

 following a mild and thawing spell. The young issuing from these eggs will, also, in 

 all probability, do much damage, as they did in the Spring and Summer of 18G7. I3ut 

 the actual damage cannot be foretold, as so much depends on circumstances. In 1867^ 

 in many counties of Kansas and Missouri, where the ground had been tilled with eggs 

 the previous Fall, little harm was done in the Spring — so small a percentage of the 

 eggs came to anything and so unmercifully were the young destroyed by natural 

 enemies. A severe frost kills the young after they have hatched, where a moderate 

 frost does not affect them. In Missouri, if we have no weather that prove fatal to 

 either eggs or young, considerable damage may be expected, but not as much as in the 

 country to the West; for, as already stated, we received the more scattering remains 

 of the vast army, and the eggs are neither as numerous, nor will they hatch as early in 

 our territory as farther West. Following a rather mild February the March of '67 was 

 a very severe one, the thermometer frequently indicating 18 degrees below zero, and, 

 according to Mr. W. F. Goble, of Pleasant Eidge, Kansas, who wrote an excellent 

 account of the insect,* this severe weather caused many of the eggs to perish ; and he 

 expresses the opinion that "judging from the voraciousness of those that did appear, 

 1 doubt not Kansas would have been made a perfect desert if all had lived." 



If after the young hoppers hatch we have much cold wet weather, great numbers 

 of them will congregate in sheltered places and perish before doing serious harm ; but 

 if, on the contrary, our Spring and early Summer prove dry and hot (which is hardly 

 to be expected after the several dry seasons lately experienced) much damage will re- 

 sult from these young locusts, where no effort is made to prevent it. They will ruin 

 most garden truck, do much injury to grain, and affect plants very much in the order 

 previously indicated under the head of "Food-plants.'' They will become more and 

 more injurious as they get older, until, in about two months from the time of hatching, 

 or about the middle of June, they will begm to acquire wings, become restless, and in 

 all probability leave the locality where they were born, either wending their way fur- 

 ther South or returning in the direction whence their parents came the previous yeai*. 

 Some bevies may even pass to the eastward of the limit line reached in 1871, and fall 

 upon some of the counties bordering that line; but they will lay no eggs, and will, in 

 time, run their course and perish from debility, disease and parasites. In 1870 the 

 Eocky Mountain Locust will scarcely be heard of within our borders ; a few remnants 

 from Kansas or Nebraska, or from the country to the southwest, may make their pres- 

 ence manifest, if the year should be exceptionally favorable to their development; but, 

 whether delayed till i 876, or even till 1877, the last one will eventually vanish from 

 Missouri soil, and their race will no more be known among us till — perhaps within the 

 next six or eight years; perhaps not within the next twenty— a fresh swarm wings its 

 way to our borders from the plains along the mountain regions. There is, therefore, 

 no danger of their overrunning the State to the east of the limit line ; nor of their doing 

 permanent injury in the counties they now occupy. — [7th Eeport, pp. 166-7. 



How closely subsequent events verified these predications, the fol- 

 lowing pages and the experience of 1875, so fresh in the minds of our 

 people, attest. Yet the fearful devastation that actually followed was 

 scarcely anticipated, and the conclusion there drawn that the eggs in 

 our western counties invaded were less numerous than in the country 

 further west proved incorrect, for the insects were fully as numerous 

 within our borders as they were across Ihe lino in the eastern part of 

 Kansas. 



The territory which received the last remnants of the vast army» 

 and in which, from the more scattered numbers and greater debility 

 of the insects, fewer eggs were laid, was less extensive than I had cal- 

 culated, and as will be seen from the chapters where I more particularly 



•Monthly Reports, Dcp. Agr. 18()7, p. 290. 



