36 USEFUL BIRDS. 



States Department of Agriculture for 1904, gives the loss 

 from insect depredations for that year as seven hundred and 

 ninety-five million, one hundred thousand dollars ; and this 

 is believed to be a conservative estimate of the tax now im- 

 posed by injurious insects on the people of the United States, 

 without reckoning the millions of dollars that are expended 

 annually in labor and insecticides in the fight against insects. 1 



LOSSES BY INSECT RAVAGES IN MASSACHUSETTS. 



The proportion of this loss that Massachusetts is called 

 upon to bear has not received the attention that it deserves. 

 Some figures, however, may be given. In 1861 the army 

 worm (probably Heliophila unipuncta) swept eastern Mas- 

 sachusetts. The damage done to crops, according to Dr. 

 Packard, exceeded five hundred thousand dollars. 2 We have 

 no estimates of the loss occasioned by more recent invasions 

 of this insect. Prof. C. H. Fernald 3 estimates that an amount 

 of cranberries equal to one-third the possible crop of the Cape 

 Cod region is annually destroyed by insects. Thus a sum 

 not less than five hundred thousand dollars is yearly lost to 

 the people of that region. 



In 1890 Dr. Henry H. Goodell, president of the Massa- 

 chusetts Agricultural College, stated that it was costing the 

 farmers of the United States two million dollars, and the 

 farmers of Massachusetts eighty thousand dollars, each year, 

 to hold the Colorado potato beetle in check by the use of 

 Paris green. 4 



In 1901 Hon. J. W. Stockwell, then secretary of the 

 Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, asked me to esti- 

 mate the annual loss to the Commonwealth through the rav- 

 ages of insect pests. My estimate, which seemed to me at 



1 The Annual Loss occasioned by Destructive Insects in the United States, by 

 C. L. Marlatt. Yearbook, United States Department of Agriculture, 1904, p. 464. 



2 First Report on Injurious and Beneficial Insects of Massachusetts, by A. S. 

 Packard. Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, 1870, 

 Part I, p. 353. 



3 In Bulletin No. 19 of the Hatch Experiment Station of the Massachusetts 

 Agricultural College, Professor Fernald gives statistics of the cranberry crop, 

 and evidence from which his estimate is made. 



4 Agricultural Education, by H. H. Goodell. Sixth Annual Report of the 

 Rhode Island State Board of Agriculture, 1891, p. 186. 



