42 " THE LEAVES OF THE TREE were FOR THE HEALING OF THE NATIONS." 



THE MEDITERRANEAN FLOUR-MOTH. 

 (from the San Francisco Morning Call, Dec. 8, 1892.) 



"The terrible ephestia kuhniella (Zeller) is spreading millions of darkening wings, 

 and coming as the locusts came by the Mle. They started from Eastern Europe 

 several years ago, and, advancing like the cholera, and by si.nilar means, have now 

 reached the Pacific Coast. They are stopping whirring flouring- mills, and are in 

 our daily bread, our morning gems, pancakes and mush and our evening pies and 

 sweet cakes. There is no joke about it. The Mediterranean flour moth is really 

 <^oing those things. It has just gained a fair foothold here, and, as it rapidly spreads, 

 it is proving a very expensive, annoying and disagreeable insect pest. The annoy- 

 ance promises to increase rapidly, and a determined warfare will soon be waged 

 against it generally throughout the State. The flour-moth bad not been heard of 

 here until two or three years rgo when it appeared in a few mills in this city, and 

 it has been but a few months since it began to attract general attention among the 

 millers, as it gradually spread from mill to mill, but it has already cost them 

 thousands of dollars, and they have just become thoroughly wakened to an alarmed 

 inquiry about the pest and how to fight it. It seems strange that a noiseless little 

 moth less than an inch long and so light it cannot withstand a breath should stop 

 * the steam driven shafts of a great flouring- mill from turning, but it does. It does 

 more than that, too. It ruins fresh flour and meal by the barrel, and it makes the 

 housewife turn up her nose in disgust while she is getting breakfast and then go 

 back to the groceryman with a complaint. It makes the groceryman complain to 

 the miller, and along the line from the miller to the breakfast table there is turn- 

 ing up of noses, a loss of good flour and oatmeal and buckwheat and a general 

 wondering what is the matter. People may now understand it all and lay the blame 

 on Providence or foreign immigration. (Yes, "lay the blame on Providence," as 

 we have always done, to, if possible, shirk our own responsibilities.) 

 It seemed odd that an insect at this late age of the world should discover for the first 

 time that flour was good eating and that flourmills made good homes after letting 

 flourmills alone for ages, but Professor Johnson Could not explain this late pro- 

 gressive move of the flour- moth." 



A WAIL FROM MALTA. 



A highly interesting letter from the pen of Mr. John H. Cook, of 

 St. Julian, Malta, dated September 22nd, 1892, referring to "The re- 

 markable falling off in the quantity and quality of the fruit" in that part 

 of the world, appeared in the printed Reports of the Consuls of the Uni- 

 ted States, No. 149, February, 1893, (folios 261-263). Mr. Cook declares, 

 and evidently U. S. Consul Worthington affirms: 



" That unless some energetic measures be adopted to counteract the influences of 

 the causes that are at work, within a comparatively brief period of time many fruits, 

 such as the orange and mandarine, for the growth of which the Maltese Islands 

 have so long been famous, will be either exterminated or will be cultivated only as 

 curiosities. It is, I believe, a well known fact that the orange, mandarine, lemon, 

 fig, nectarine, olive, apricot, apple, pear, grape in fact all fruit and most kinds 

 of vegetables grown in these islands are at present affected with a variety of dis- 

 eases that not only attack the fruit, but also devitalize the tree to such an extent 

 as to jeopardise its very existence. The Malta orange is at the present time affec- 

 ted with four different kinds of diseases. . . . Another foe, which is 

 of an even more deadly character, is the beetle cerambyx, which, while in the 

 caterpillar stage, bores its way into the heart of the trunk of the nespola and the 

 apple trees, and causes them to rapidly decay. But it is not the fruit gardens 

 alone that have been invaded by insect pests." The pea crop of last year was seri- 

 ously diminished by the attacks of a worm called the " cadell," and of an aphis 

 called the " blanqueta." . . . The wheat, tae sulla, the cotton the staple 

 productions of the Malta soil all have insect foes in numbers that are out of all 

 proportion to the area of the districts in which the crops are grown. To what are 

 we to attribute this invasion of insect pests?" 



