1846.] Insects Injurious to Vegetation. 257* 



he having in numerous instances watched the fly in the very act 

 of ovipositing. At a later day Mr. T. has favored the public 

 with a more full and exact description of this process. {^Cvlti- 

 vator, viii., p. 82.) James Worth of Pennsylvania, also in 1820 

 minutely described from his personal observations, the situation 

 of the egg, its hatching, and the journey of the worm down the 

 leaf to its usual nidus. (^American Farmer, ii., 180.) 



In the second volume of the Memoirs of the JVeio York Board 

 oj" Agriculture, issued in 1823, is a communication (p. 169-171) 

 on the Hessian fly, from Judge Hickock, who deems a fertile soil 

 the best safeguard. In the third volume of the same work, pub- 

 lished in 1826, (p. 326-338,) is a paper by the indefatigable 

 secretary of the board, the late Judge Buel, giving a condensed 

 summary of all the information respecting this insect, contained 

 in the accounts of Judge Havens, Dr. Chapman, and the different 

 writers in the American Farmer. 



In 1840, Miss Margaretta H. Morris, of Germantown, Pa., in 

 a communication to the American Philosophical Society, revives 

 the theory of " a landholder," already noticed, that the egg of the 

 fly is deposited in the grain, and that obtaining seed from unin- 

 fected districts will therefore be the best safeguard. The report 

 of the committee upon this paper, is inserted in the society's jjro- 

 ceedings of November, 1840, and the paper itself is published in 

 the society's Transactions (vol. viii., p. 49-51). Communications 

 bearing upon the same subject were also made to the Academy 

 of Natural Sciences, in 1841, by Dr. B. H. Coates. {Proceedings 

 Acad., vol. i., p. 45, 54 and 57.) 



In 1841, ]\Ir. E. C. Herrick, librarian of Yale College, gives 

 "a brief, preliminary account of the Hessian fly, and its parasites," 

 in Silliman's Journal of Science (vol. xli., p. 153-158). This 

 paper announces the interesting fact of Mr. Dana's having met 

 with apparently the same insect on the shores of the Mediterra- 

 nean, details the writer's own accurate observations of the changes 

 from the egg to the flax seed state, and enumerates four different 

 parasitic insects that prey upon it during these periods of its existence, 

 by which " probably more than nine-tenths of every generation of 



