33& TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



Will you please call the attention of the club to the subject; 

 and if there is a remedy I shall esteem it a great favor to be 



informed. 



Trusting you will not esteem this an improper intrusion, I 

 subscribe myself with the highest esteem for your zealous devo- 

 tion to the noble cause of agriculture. 



Yours, very respectfully, 

 To H. Meigs, Esq., Secretary of the G. B. STACY. 



Farmers' Club, New-York city. 



The Secretary hoped that the club would pay close attention 

 to this little devastator of our glorious own Indian corn. 



I find in Harris' excellent treatise on American insects, 

 accounts of this dangerous little creature, which ought to be 

 known throughout our country, and not locked up in our libraries. 

 See Prof. Harris, 2d edition, page 172, &c. 



" The wheat fields and cornfields of the south and west often 

 suffer severely from the depredations of certain minute bugs long 

 known there by the name of Chinch hugs, which fortunately have 

 not yet been observed in New-England." (While this sheet is 

 passing through the press, I have to record the discovery of one 

 of these bugs in my own garden, on the 17th of June, 1852.) 



They are mentioned in the 11th volume of Young's Annals of 

 Agriculture, published, I believe, about 1788. From this work 

 Messrs. Kirby and Spence probably obtained the following 

 account, contained in the first volume of their interesting intro- 

 duction to entomology : " America suffers in its wheat and maize 

 from the attack of an insect, which, for what reason I know not, 

 is called the chinch bug fly. (It is like the bed bug which hides 

 in chinks. H. Meigs.) It appears to be apterous (without 

 wings), and is said, in scent and color to resemble the bed bug. 

 They travel in immense columns from field to field, like locusts, 

 destroying every thing as they proceed ; but their injuries are 

 confined to the states south of north latitude 40^" From this 

 account add Kirby and Spence: " the depredator here noticed 

 should belong to the Geocorisse of Latreille, but it seems very 

 diflacult to conceive how an insect which lives by suction,^and 

 has no mandibles could destroy these plants so perfectly." I 

 have ascertained from an examination of living specimens, that 

 the Chinch bug is the Lygmus leucopterus or white-winged 

 Lygseus described by Mr. Say, in December, 1831, in a rare little 

 pamphlet on the Heteropterus Hemiptera of North America." 



