230 Harrises Insects of New England 



season, will save a great deal of vexation and disappointment afterwards. 

 If this precaution be neglected or deferred till the vines have begun to 

 spread, it will be exceedingly difficult to exterminate the insects, on 

 account of their numbers ; and, if at this time dry weather should prevail, 

 the vines will suffer so much from the bugs and drought together, as to 

 produce but little if any fruit. Whatever contributes to bring forward the 

 plants rapidly, and to promote the vigor and luxuriance of their foliage, 

 renders them less liable to suffer by the exhausting punctures of the 

 young bugs. Water drained from a cow-yard, and similar preparations 

 have, with this intent, been applied with benefit." 



To tlie fifth order, Lepidoptera, belong those winged 

 beanties of day and night habits, known as bntterflies and 

 moths; and whose larvae are known as caterpillars. "Of 

 these five hundred species, which are natives of Massachu- 

 setts, are already known to me, and probably there are 

 at least as many more kinds to be discovered within the 

 limits of this Commonwealth. As each female usually lays 

 from two hundred to five hundred eggs, one thousand dif- 

 ferent kinds of bntterflies and moths will produce, on an 

 average, three hundred thousand caterpillars : if one half 

 of this number, when arrived at maturity, are females, 

 they will give forty-five millions of caterpillars in the sec- 

 ond, and six thousand seven hundred and fifty millions in 

 the third generation." 



The green parsley worm, which makes itself quite at 

 home among our umbelliferous plants, and despoils the foli- 

 age of several of our valuable culinary plants, is the larva 

 of a fine butterfly, which we should hardly be willing to 

 destroy, even if we could catch it, a task not always so 

 easily etfected as imagined. To watch the nice balancing 

 on wing of the Sphinx qulnqucmaculatiis, and to notice the 

 curious mechanism of its long fl.exile tongue queerly stowed 

 away under its chin, when not in use, would quite deter 

 any one from doing bodily injury to the perfect form of the 

 potato-worm. A very naughty larva form of a beautiful 

 moth we have in Sphinx Panijnnatrix^ which, not content 

 with destroying the foliage of the grape, actually snips off 

 the berries from the bunches long before they are ripe, cer- 

 tainly a piece of supererogatory work, and quite unneces- 

 sary to horticultural notions of "thinning out" the crop. 

 Who would think, too, that the sad ravager of the peach 

 tree, boring and sapping its vital energies and destroying 

 the fondest hopes of the gardener, could assume such beau- 

 tiful metamorphosis, emerging from its dark galleries at the 



