﻿116 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT 



If the States of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Texas would enact 

 similar laws, appropriate to their respective requirements, there would 

 be such combined slaughter of the insects that in all the more thickly 

 settled portions of the country subject to invasion, they would be 

 virtually annihilated before they acquired wings. It is by some such 

 uniform and concerted warfare, calculated to prevent the insects that 

 hatch out in said country from flying back to restock the Northwest, 

 that the people may hope to measurably conquer the foe and lengthen 

 the periods of immunity between the invasions. 



AREA IN WHICH EGGS WERE LAID. 



The locust invasion of 1876 was remarkable for the very large 

 area in which eggs were laid. This was almost coextensive with the 

 area invaded and is indicated in the map (Fig, 16), though the counties 

 of Murray, Cottonwood, Watonwa, Brown and parts of the adjacent 

 counties, in Minnesota, which are there included, should, as already 

 stated {anie^ p. 62) be excepted. 



The eggs are most thickly laid in the eastern, more settled and 

 more generally cultivated portion of the belt, and less thickly in the 

 thinly settled prairie country. Another noticeable feature of this 

 invasion was, that, from Minnesota to the Gulf, egg-laying continued 

 till the females were buried in the first snows or killed by the first 

 severe frosts. Far into November and after the thermometer had fre- 

 quently fallen several degrees below the freezing point, I found them 

 rousing from the night's benumbing cold, and, under the increasing 

 warmth of the sun toward noon, laying in exposed and sunny places. 

 Hiding in the dry grass or under other shelter where they were unseen 

 during the cooler parts of the day, one might pass through a country 

 at such hours without suspecting their presence ; while at noon they 

 would start at every foot step. And only the day before the last one 

 was buried beyond recovery by a severe snow storm, I found females 

 not only laying, but many of them having eggs in the ovaries that 

 were yet quite small — thus showing that they prematurely perished 

 by winter's chilling blasts. 



CONDITION OF THE EGGS. 



The farmers of the West have been deeply interested in the con- 

 dition of the eggs during the Winter, and have naturally hoped that, 

 as the season advanced, the vitality oi these eggs might in some way 

 or other be impaired. I have, from time to time, examined eggs from 

 many difierent localities, and the following inquiries, with my answers, 

 as published in the Kural World at the time, will serve to indicate the 

 generally sound condition they were in, up to the first week in Feb- 

 ruary. 



