78 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1896. 



twelfth brood alone (not counting those of all of the preceding broods 

 of the same year) 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten sextillions) 

 of individuals. Where, as in this instance, figures fail to convey any 

 adequate conception, may I ask you to take space and the velocity of 

 light as your measures? Were this brood as above given marshalled 

 in line with ten individuals to a linear inch, touching one another, the 

 procession would extend to the sun (a space which light travels in 

 eight minutes), and beyond it to the nearest fixed star (traversed by 

 light only in six years), and still onward in space beyond the most 

 distant star that the strongest telescope may bring to our view, to a 

 point so inconceivably remote that light could only reach us from it 

 in twenty-five hundred years." 



The voracity of insects is enormous, and the amount of food they 

 can consume and digest is almost beyond belief. Kirby and Speuce 

 tell us that "Many caterpillars eat daily twice their weight of leaves, 

 which is as if an ox weighing sixty stone were to devour every 

 twenty-four hours three-quarters of a ton of grass." Dr. Lintner says 

 "A certain flesh-feeding larva will consume in twenty-four hours two 

 hundred times its original weight ; a parallel to which, in the human 

 race, would be an infant consuming, in the first day of its existence, 

 fifteen hundred pounds of nutriment. There are vegetable-feeders, 

 caterpillars, which, during their progress to maturity, within thirty 

 days, increase in size ten thousand times. To equal this remarkable 

 growth a man at his maturity would have to w^eigh forty tons. In 

 view of such statements need we wonder that the insect world is so 

 destructive and so potent a power for harm." 



It may be truthfully said that this country suffers far more from 

 the depredations of insects than any other ; and this is to be expected 

 in view of the methods employed in agriculture and the conditions 

 under which it is here conducted. 



Insects have seriously affected the agriculture of many States. The 

 Chinch bug is said to have done an injury to the agriculture of Illi- 

 nois amounting to seventy-three million dollars in a single year. The 

 cotton worm has destroyed a considerable portion of the cotton crop 

 nearly every season until within quite recent years, and this damage 

 has been estimated at from twenty-five million dollars to fifty million 

 dollars annually in the cotton States. It is said that in Massachusetts 

 from seventy-five thousand dollars to eighty thousand dollars is ex- 

 pended yearly to stay the ravages of the potato beetle, and the total 

 cost of fighting the potato beetle in the United States is estimated at 

 two hundred million dollars annually. The damage done to agricul- 

 tural products in the United States by insects has been variously esti- 

 mated during different years within the last half century at from two 



