30 



V 

 \ 



"Tenthredo," whose larvae, as he stated, " burrow within the stems 

 and feed upon them."" Doctor Harris, in the edition of 1S41 of his 

 Insects of Massachusetts, page 434, refers to the statement of Dr. 

 Andrew Nichols, of Danvers, who stated that worms found in his 

 barlej^ straw were about one-tenth of an inch in length and of a j^el- 

 low or straw color, and that in the month of November the}^ appeared 

 to have passed into the chrysalis state, but living- through winter 

 unchanged in the straw. The insects referred to by Mr. AVorth, of 

 Penns\'lvania, and Mr. Muse, of Marj^land, might quite probablj^ have 

 been Isosoma trltlci Fitch, but if the one referred to by Doctor Nichols 

 was an Isosoma at all it was certainly I. grande^ as that is the only 

 species attacking grain that is known to pupate in the fall. Thus it 

 will be seen that it is not easy to determine just what Harris might have 

 included as belonging to his I. hordel^ though he nowhere states that it 



Avas ever obtained from 

 any other than barley 

 straw; hence the name, 

 hordei., applied to it. It 

 is interesting to know 

 that specimens labeled in 

 his handwriting "Para- 

 sitic in barley, June 15, 

 1830," are still in the 

 museum of the Boston 

 Society of Natural His- 

 tory, so that there can 

 be no mistake in the 

 identity of the insect 

 described. Even in the 

 edition of his Insects of 

 Massachusetts, of 1841, Harris makes no mention of his species having 

 been found affecting wheat. In the edition of 1852 he relates that 

 about eight years before children sleeping on straw beds in Cam- 

 bridge, Mass., had been bitten by these insects and the annoj-ance had 

 been so great that the beds, both straw and ticks, had been burned. 

 Now people do not use barley straw for such domestic purposes, nor 

 in fact do the}' use wheat straw as a rule, but oat straw. As Doctor 

 Harris does not enlighten us as to what kind of straw it was from 

 which the insects annoying the children came, we still have no direct 

 proof that this species was ever known in connection with wheat straAV. 

 About 1852 there appeared a similar trouble in the barley in cen- 

 tral New York, and though Doctor Fitch described it as a distinct 

 species under the name Eurytoma falvipes^^ we now know that it was 



«Loc. cit., vol. 5, p. 113. 



''Jour. N. Y. Agricultural Soc, Vol. IX, p. 115. 



Fig. 10. — Isosoma hordei Harris: a<lult of the barley .straw-worm 

 (from Howard). 



