﻿58 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT 



From most of the Western States the crop returns were favorable, 

 though the harvest was in many sections impeded, as it was in 1875, by 

 too much wet weather. In no part of the country was the outlook 

 more flattering than in western Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and 

 the country so seriously ravaged by locusts the previous year, and the 

 farmers throughout that section of country had seldom been freer 

 from insect ravages, or more hopeful. The freedom from other noxious 

 insects was everywhere apparent in our own western counties. In 

 parts of the Northwest, as in the East, the conditions were veiy differ- 

 ent from what they were with us, and the crops suffered more or less 

 from excessive drouth. In Colorado, early in the season, there was 

 some alarm, as the insects hatched in many localities, but by no 

 means so generally as in the previous years. By persevering effort 

 the farmers generally got the mastery over them and have made good 

 crops. In Minnesota, again, in some of the southern counties, where 

 eggs were laid, considerable damage was done, though nothing like 

 as much as in 1875. During the second week of July the locusts took 

 wing from that region, and it is interesting to note that they instinct- 

 ively took a north and northwest course, just as the fledged insects 

 bad done a few weeks earlier in the season from Missouri and the 

 adjacent country to the west the year before. Numerous dispatches 

 to St. Paul, Minneapolis, and other papers, show conclusively that the 

 general direction taken was northwest, and that when the wind was 

 unfavorable the insects awaited a change. 



Such was the condition of things up to the early part of August, 

 ^nd I began to hope that the country that had suffered so much of late 

 years by locust devastations, was at last free from the scourge, and 

 would not be overrun again for some years to come. But the great 

 drouth which prevailed in the Northwest appears to have favored the 

 multiplication of the insects in, and their migration from their native 

 baunts, and no sooner had the people begun to congratulate them- 

 selves on the good riddance of the pests, than reports came of the 

 movement of new swarms from the north and northwest. From that 

 time on, till the approach of Winter, their movements were reported 

 •and they overswept a large part of the Western country. 



On the assumption that the hosts that went to make up the inva- 

 sions of 1873 and 1874 had made an exodus from their native breeding 

 places, and that those, if any, which returned thereto in 1875 were 

 more or less diseased, it was natural to conclude that a few years 

 would be required for the species to again become unduly multiplied 

 there and be constrained to migrate. The intervals that had elapsed 

 in the past between general invasions favored such reasoning. The 



