42 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Now I want to associate with that the gypsy moth for this 

 reason, if the gypsy moth gets here it will be worse than the 

 brown-tail, and there is no reason why it should not get here. 

 And it may be here. I have investigated five different reports^ 

 two of them from Massachusetts men, one of them a superin- 

 tendent of one of the parks who had charge of fourteen men 

 working under him in the gypsy moth work, and he declared 

 straight up and down that he saw these egg clusters in the city 

 of Portland a year ago last March. I told him that I thought 

 strange that with the work that we did last spring we didn't 

 discover the gypsy moth if it was in Portland. " Well," he said^ 

 "don't you suppose I know the gypsy moth?" I said: "I 

 don't account for that at all." I went to the superintendent and 

 said " How long has that man been employed as superintendent 

 of the park ? " He said " A little over a year." I asked him 

 " What did he know of the gypsy moth a year ago last March ? "■ 

 He said, " He probably didn't know much about it." So I came 

 to Portland, investigated where he said they were, and it was 

 the tussock moth. The city of Portland is overrun with another 

 species of insect, and the superintendent of the park commis- 

 sion told me last week that three years ago they took twenty 

 barrels of just the egg clusters of the tussock moth in the city of 

 Portland, and today I think they could do the same. 



We had families move down here from the infested district in 

 Massachusetts, right where the gypsy caterpillars were crawling 

 all over their sheds and wood-piles, come down here right in the 

 time of the caterpillars' crawling, and move their stores with 

 them. What do you think of that? Just as soon as it was 

 reported of course the wood was burned. A young lady came 

 this fall. She had a dress that she had hung away, hadn't had 

 it on for two or three weeks. She came from there about the 

 time the caterpillars were spinning their cocoons. She got the 

 dress to put it on, felt a queer sensation on her arm, took it oflf 

 and found one done up in the sleeve of her dress. There are 

 lots of ways of getting them here. Now why do we dread 

 these? Because they will eat anything — they are like goats, 

 anything but tin cans. Our evergreen trees, if they strip them 

 once they are dead. And so in one way we ought to dread them 

 more than we would the brown-tail. It is true they won't spread 

 as rapidly ; but yet those of you who have visited Massachusetts 

 know what the condition is there and how we ought to dread 



