AMOUNT OF DAMAGE. 289 



reported by correspondents as " worms." The two taken together, 

 though, form a pair capable of doing damage such as few crops beside 

 cotton are afflicted with. 



Corn is the only other crop which the boll- worm afflicts at all com- 

 parably to cotton, and, although in this article we shall consider this 

 insect only in its relation to the cotton crop, in speaking of its impor- 

 tance it may be well to state the harm occasionally done to corn. One 

 of the most marked instances was in 1860, in Kansas. It was a year of 

 great drought, and the corn crop was almost entirely destroyed by the 

 corn-worm. According to the Prairie Farmer of January 31, 1861, one 

 county which in 1859 raised 436,000 bushels of corn, only produced 

 5,000 bushels in 1860, and this was poor and full of worms, and this 

 seems to have been a fair sample for the State. This very season, a 

 writer from Cherokee County, Kansas, addressed Coleman's Rural 

 World, complaining bitterly of the destruction of the corn- worm. He 

 states that there was not an ear in his cornfield which the worms had 

 not eaten. 



Professor Eiley says: 



It attacks corn in the ear, at first feeding on the silk, but afterwards devouring the 

 kernels at the terminal end; being securely sheltered the while within the husk. I 

 have seen whole fields of corn nearly ruined in this way in the State of Kentucky; but 

 nowhere have I known it to be so destructive as in Southern Illinois. 



Professor French says : 



As a general thing I think it has not been so destructive during the past season as 

 it is sometimes, but in one field of late corn I found nearly every ear eateu by them, 

 there being from one to half a dozen worms to each ear. In many of them, when my 

 observations were made, while the corn was yet soft, the process of molding and 

 decay had progressed to such an extent that it was difficult to conceive that such corn 

 could ever become anything fit for man or beast to eat. 



In the Department of Agriculture Eeport for 1855 we find the follow- 

 ing statement : 



In an interesting communication from Col. Benjamin F. Whitner, of Tallahassee, 

 Fla., he states that the boll- worm was scarcely known in his neighborhood before the 

 year 1841 ; and yet, in the short period of fourteen years, it had increased to such a 

 degree as to have become one of the greatest enemies to the cotton on several planta- 

 tions in that vicinity. 



In 1867, a correspondent from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, stated that 

 " the boll- worm destroys about one-half the crop with us. This year 

 none of my neighbors raise cotton." 



These instances will be sufficient to show the estimation in which the 

 boll- worm is generally held throughout the South. The estimates of 

 damage caused by this insect are, however, almost always exaggerated. 

 Very many young " squares " perish from some cause ; it may bo from 

 non-fertilization, from some peculiarity of the weather, or from injury 

 caused by some other insect than HeliotMs ; but many planters attrib- 

 ute the destruction of all their young bolls to the boll -worm, and adduce 

 as evidence of this the fact that a large proportion of the bolls exhibit 

 19 c I 



