40 PRIZE ESSAY : 



habits of both indigenous and foreign insects injurious to culti- 

 vated crops, so that the introduction of new species into this 

 continent, in the ordinary way of commercial traffic, or by the 

 curious in such matters, may, if possible, be prevented ; and if 

 by any means a new foreign insect should take up its residence 

 with us and attract public attention by its ravages, much valuable 

 and available information might be speedily disseminated from a 

 familiarity with the history of the depredator in those countries 

 where it had long been known, and of the means which were 

 there adopted to arrest its progress or lessen its destmctiveness. 

 65. Instances are continually occurring which illustrate the 

 value of the kind of information referred to. During the last 

 few years two new importations of insects from Germany, de- 

 structive to the turnip, have been made in Great Britain. These 

 new arrivals are described in a paper (have mislaid the reference) 

 published in a recent agricultural Scottish journal. 



The Australian wheat ravager, so destructive to the splendid 

 crops of grain produced in many parts of that magnificent coun- 

 try, has been brought to Canada as an entomological curiosity ; 

 and I am very credibly informed that several living specimens 

 are now in this country, closely, and it is to be hoped securely 

 imprisoned, in a glass bottle. 



6 6. It is quite possible from the habits of the Hessian fly in 

 its larvae and pupa states, that it may have been brought into 

 America in straw or otherwise from some of the many European 

 countries, where it appears to have been well known long before 

 it committed on this continent those terrible devastations which 

 threatened at one time to arrest the cultivation of wheat in some 

 of the Atlantic States of the American Union. 



6/. A common impression prevails that this insect was intro- 

 duced into America by the Hessian troops in their straw from 

 Germany, during the year 1776, at which time the British Army, 



