REPORT 



OF 



SOME INJURIOUS INSECTS OF THE YEAR 1878, 



BY J. A. LINTNER. 



It should not be necessary, and I trust iysfrot, that extended remarks 

 should be offered to the members of the New York State Agricultural 

 Society upon the importance of the study of insects in their economic 

 relations. You are all prepared to bear ready witness to the truth that 

 the difficulties which you have to encounter, are not so much with an 

 unproductive soil as with over-productive insects : the field, the orchard 

 and the garden, bear one unvarying testimony to this truth. You have 

 all felt the tax imposed upon your labor and its expected product, 

 through insect injuries, but few of you are prepared to realize the reg- 

 ular recurrence of this tax and its magnitude, from the insidious secrecy 

 with which it is levied and enforced. A moment's reflection will con- 

 vince you that a half-crop, as the direct result of the depredations of the 

 wheat-midge, the Hessian-fly, the grain-aphis, the army-worm or a 

 score of other pests which might be enumerated can have but this inter- 

 pretation a levy of fifty per cent upon the aggregate value of the crop 

 usually submitted to without an effort being made to resist itsrecurrence 

 another year. Were the State to make this assessment not to spread 

 it through myriads of ravenous stomachs as excrementa upon the ground, 

 but to mold and pile up the enduring granite of yonder noble struc- 

 ture, in which succeeding generations may feel an honest pride would 

 it be as quietly submitted to? That crop is an exceptional one which 

 the insect does not tithe, often without our knowledge. The poverty and 

 starvation which the Rocky Mountain locust has borne with it through 

 our Western States and Territories, tells of destruction of entire crops as 

 complete as if swept by a fire. 



To present these losses in a somewhat comprehensible form, it may be 

 stated, that a careful estimate of losses through insecr, ravages within 

 the United States, based upon the census returns of the value of the 

 agricultural products of the country, and estimates of injuries inflicted 

 by certain insects within certain States, gives, as the aggregate of an- 

 nual losses, two hundred millions of dollars ($200,000,000). The loss 

 occasioned by the chinch-bug alone, in Illinois, in a single year, was 

 computed at .seventy-three millions of dollars ($73,000,000). 



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