200 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



It is now some six or seven years since they first appeared in this 

 vicinity. At first they were but few and scattering — the advanced scouts, 

 and videttes of the myriad army behind, and caused no apprehension ; but 

 each successive year the swarm was quadrupled, perhaps centupled. It 

 is a small green slug, half an inch or so in length, which preys almost un- 

 ceasingly, day and night, on both sides of the leaves, destroying their 

 parenchyma, leaving its delicate though useless skeleton, which soon drops 

 ofi". Sometimes in a couple of days every leaf is destroyed on a large, fine 

 bush. And it is the more provoking that the worms always appear just 

 as the flower-buds are opening. You shall go out in the morning, in the 

 early part of June ; hundreds of buds are just bursting into life and 

 glory, — your bushes never looked better ; and, notwithstanding all your 

 former bitter lessons of experience, you try to indulge the hope that this 

 year the destroyer will not appear. Vain hope ! Before night, thousands 

 of minute but active green slugs have commenced their ravages ; the next 

 day the shrub wears a sadly blighted look, and in a day or two more every 

 leaf and bud is gone. In a few weeks the poor stricken thing throws out 

 a feeble crop of leaves, but throughout the rest of the season it appears 

 wan and sickly ; and in the course of three or four summons, if the pro- 

 cess is repeated, it gets tired of wjvging this inefi'ectual war, and gives up 

 the struggle. 



Can the assembled wisdom of your bucolic and 3ugu.st conclave furnish 

 a remedy for all this ? If they can, and will give it to the world — that it 

 will be one of the most useful meetings which they ever had, is the sincere 

 opinion of at least one sufferer. 



Four years ago I had upwards of a hundred different kinds of roses, the 

 choicest varieties which I could procure, of which seventy or eighty would 

 be in bloom at the same time. Most of them are dead — having succombed 

 to this regular, deadly, successive annual defoliation. And the sickly 

 survivors — fighting for dear life — have no vitality to blossom. Only two 

 manage to make any show at all — the " Yellow Harrison," which is of so 

 early a habit that it blooms just before the pests appear, and the " Mount 

 Joy," which fortunately bloissoms so late that they have nearly all disap- 

 peared. 



Of course, in this as in other measures, nearly every one knows of a 

 certain remedy. But it does not require a long life, or very extensive 

 opportunities of observation, to find out that " certain remedies " are the 

 most uncertain things in the world, I will mention a few, which I have 

 tried, and their results : 



Covering the ground with lime. One of your lady correspondents, a 

 few weeks since, stated that she had saved her roses by keeping the ground 

 under the bushes covered with lime, which seemed to prevent the larvae of 

 last year's insects coming out of the earth to renew their depredations. I 

 can only say that she is more fortunate than I have been, and I have tried 

 it repeatedly. Like the curculio, this insect, in its imago state, probably 

 flies from tree to tree or bush to bush. 



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