COTTON CULTURE. 91 



But age comes on apace with these ephemeral creatures ; 

 the worm presently grows weary of devouring, selects a 

 leaf, rolls himself in a little cocoon, and dies. From each 

 of the cocoons, in a few days, a moth emerges, and these 

 deposit the eggs from which the devouring host is hatch- 

 ed. But their numbers and their voracity now become 

 fatal to themselves as well as to the crop on which they 

 feed. They consume the last leaf on the last plant of a 

 field, leaving no place upon which their cocoons can be 

 deposited. If, by accident, a few moths should be repro- 

 duced, they would find no pasturage for the young to be 

 hatched from their eggs, for the creature can eat nothing 

 but cotton. When the growth of a field is consumed, 

 they start away feebly for another range, but the first 

 fence or ditch arrests them. The sun kills them, the birds 

 pick them up, the wheels of a wagon, passing along a 

 plantation road, crush millions of them ; so that in two 

 days from the time the crop was devoured, not one of the 

 voracious army may survive. They perish as utterly as 

 the hosts of Pharoah, and the discomfited planter is re- 

 minded of 



" The sojourners of Goshen, who "beheld 

 From the safe shore, their floating carcasses 

 And broken chariot- wheels." 



Those who have studied the habits and peculiarities of 

 this insect, have arrived at the following conclusions : 



1st. That nature has made no provision by which either 

 the fly, the worm, the chrysalis, or the eggs, can survive 

 the winter or exist for any length of time where the cotton 

 plant is not a perennial. 



3d. There is no regularity in their advent, no law that 

 seems to prescribe the times of their re-appearing. 



3d. Their progress is from north to soutli) and from 

 west to east. That is, in the United States, the cotton of 

 Louisiana and Texas is liable to suffer the first attack, and 

 the fields of Arkansas, Tennessee, and the Carolinns, will 



