THE COTTON-WORM. 130 



entertained, that the army-worm would become an annual 

 plague. But since I have investigated their nature I have 

 come to the conclusion that these fears are groundless, and 

 that the cotton-fly can never become naturalized in our 

 climate. 



The first irruption, as I am informed by an old planter, that 

 this insect made on the cotton fields of Louisiana, was about 

 the year 1820, when its progress was marked with the same 

 utter destruction of the cotton crop as in the subsequent years 

 of their appearance. It then disappeared until '40, a period 

 of twenty years. There is something singular and unaccount- 

 able in the periods of this insect, something vastly different 

 from the periodicities of others which we find with us, for they 

 appear to be governed by some fixed laws; the most of them 

 are annual, very few biennial. Now, the grasshopper, house- 

 fly and mosquito may be looked for at the return of summer 

 with as much confidence and certainty as we look for the 

 revolutions of the seasons. The cicada septendeccm never 

 fails to make his appearance once in seventeen years. But 

 who can tell whether the cotton-fly will appear next year or 

 fifty years hence ? No scourge, whether under the form of a 

 devouring insect or that of a malignant disease, ever became 

 annual in one particular place. Look at the locust of Egypt ; 

 suppose that voracious insect to become annual, the prolific 

 valley of the Nile, once the granary of Asia and Europe, 

 would become a howling desert. Look at the plague that 

 devastates sometimes Smyrna and Constantinople; did the 

 cause of that distemper act with the like intensity at each 

 return of the season, those flourishing cities would long since 

 have been numbered with Thebes and Memphis. Let the 

 cholera or yellow fever prevail in New Orleans every year, 

 as it has at times, and that great emporium of the Southwest 

 would become a puny village. Is there not an invisible hand 



