MONTHLY 



JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



VOL. III. FEBRUARY, 1848. NO. 8. 



THE TOBACCO WORM AND FLY: 



FARTHER REMARKS ON THEIR NATURAL HISTORY AND HABITS. 



The following letter was prefaced with apologies, altogether unnecessary, as 

 the reader will perceive, for the writer's want of habit and experience in writing 

 for the Press. As often happens with such apologies from such writers, they are 

 followed by exactly that sort of plain-as-a-pike-stafF sort of statement which is 

 at once most intelligible and most pleasing to every reader who likes to throw 

 aside the shell and come at once to the kernel of the matter. This letter from 

 Mr. DoRSETT, as well as those lately received from Mr. Bowie and Mr. James 

 Owens, Jr., on the subject of Tobacco — Mr. Caperton on Grazing, and Doctor 

 Williamson on Fattening Cattle — all of which occur to us at the moment— as 

 well as many others that might be designated, besides the information they con- 

 vey, go to convince us how much knoAvledge, more than is usually supposed, is 

 locked up, as it were, in the experience and the minds of the plainest practical 

 farmers and planters, confined to themselves, or at most communicated orally to 

 their immediate neighbors, and which ought to be universally disseminated for 

 common benefit. 



In regard to the habits of these pestiferous insects, we confess that we did not 

 expect, when we commenced the inquiry, that so much observation had been 

 made ; and even though its promulgation should lead to no practical preventives 

 against their ravages, at the moment, the facts related are not the less honorable 

 to the " habits " and the character of the observers ; inasmuch as they show that 

 Agriculture has some folloicers who pursue it as an interesting and intellectual 

 avocation, opening various fields for amusing as well as useful researches. How 

 much in real merit above the horse that he rides, or the ox that he drives, is the 

 drone whose only ambition is to count the money results of all his operations — 

 esteeming and treating the business to which his children are to devote their 

 lives as a mere beastly, mindless drudgery ? Instead of which, what industry, it 

 may be demanded, under Heaven, offers so many opportunities for the exercise 

 of benevolence — so many curious subjects of examination — such hopeful ground 

 for improvement? Why, reader ! it has been but a few years since the agricul- 

 tural world was presented, through the agency of the " Society for the Diffusion 

 of Useful Knowledge,^' (one of the most praisewortiiy and useful associations to 

 which any period of the world has given birth) — it has been but a few years 



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