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DEVOTED TO AGRICULTUBE AND ITS KTKTDEED ABTS AND SCIEN-CES. 



CALENDAR FOB AUGUST. 



August! Reign, thou Fire-Mouth! What canst thou do? — 

 Neither shalt thou destroy the earth, whom frost and ice could 

 not destroy. The vines droop, the trees stagger, the broad- 

 palmed loaves give thee their moisture, and hang down. But 

 every night the dew pities them. Yet, there are that look thee 

 In the eye, fierce Sun, all day long, and wink not. This is the 

 rejoicing month for joyful insects. If our unselfish-eye would 

 behold it, it is the most populous and the happiest month. The 

 herds plash in the sedge ; fish seek the deeper pools ; forest- 

 fowl lead out their young ; the air is resonant of insect orches- 

 tras, each one carrying his part in Nature's grand harmony. 

 August, thou art the ripeness of the year ! Thou art the glow- 

 ing centre of the circle 1 — H. W. Beecher. 



MERICA was long ago 

 characterised by 

 some European 

 naturalist, as the 

 "land of insects." 

 Warmed into ex- 

 istence by the ex- 

 cessive heat of the 

 season, a heat that 

 gives us a pretty 

 fair experience of 

 the climate of 

 countries much 

 nearer the equator, insects swarm 

 around us, by day and by night, 

 in-doors and out, in earth, air 

 and water, in such countless 

 numbers that, perhaps, August, sul- 

 try, dog-day August, may, with some 

 propriety, be denominated The Month 

 of Insects. Plagues of Egypt ! How 

 they do bother. It was by a miracle, we are told, 

 that "a grievous swarm of flies" once entered the 

 royal dwelling of the hard-hearted Pharoah, but 

 in this our "land of insects," it would be regarded 

 a miracle, indeed, were our houses exempted from 

 such annoyance for a single week, in the month of 

 August. But flies are, by no means, the most 

 troublesome of this class of our household pests. 



In many sections of our country, no pantry can be 

 made tight enough to exclude those extremely 

 "little ants" which infest some premises, in such 

 multitudes as to seem a veritable repetition of that 

 other "wonder in Egypt," by which "all the dust 

 of the land became lice." Troublesome, however, 

 as all these may be to the tidy housewife, they are 

 quite insignificant when compared with the myri- 

 ads which people our fields, and in so many ways-, 

 prove themselves to be "injurious to vegetation."' 

 From what we have read and heard about the 

 insects of Europe, we have always understood that 

 farmers there, much as they complain of their 

 losses by the depredations of various kinds of in- 

 sects on their crops, suffer much less from this 

 cause than we do here. This fact is very strongly 

 stated by Dr. Fitch, Entomologist of the New 

 York State Agricultural Society. In a recent ad- 

 dress he remarked that "the losses which we sus- 

 tain from these pests immeasurably surpass any- 

 thing of the kind to which they are subject in Eu- 

 rope. There, if an insect appears in their wheat 

 fields by which the crop is shortened an eighth or 

 a tenth from its average yield, whole communities 

 become alarmed, while here so slight a loss would 

 be disregarded and would pass wholly unnoticed." 

 It may, therefore, be assumed as probably true, 

 that there is something in our dry atmosphere, 

 hot summers, loose soils, or some other peculiarity 

 of our country, which is so favorable to the in- 

 crease and activity of this most numerous branch 

 of the animal kingdom, as to afford some ground 

 of justification for the assertion that America is 

 the land of insects. At any rate, we find multi- 

 tudes of them cutting off the young shoots of our 

 vegetables as they come up in the spring ; other 

 multitudes eat the leaves from garden plants and 

 vines, destroy our cherries, currants, plums, ap- 

 ples and pears, utterly ruin whole fields of wheat 

 and other grain, or saw away at the solid trunks 

 and limbs of trees, designed for fencing, fuel, 

 building purposes, and for oiu: furniture, until 



