ccxliv 



THE COUNTIES THAT WILL SUFFER 



are — ist, Atchison and Holt, and the western half of Nodaway and An- 

 drew, in the extreme northwest corner: 2nd, McDonald, Barry, Jasper, 

 Lawrence, Barton, Dade, Cedar, Vernon, more particularly in the south- 

 west half; Polk, in the northwest third ; Hickory, in the southwest third ; 

 and St. Clair, in scattering places. 



The locusts came into all these counties last fall, very generally ate off 

 the fall wheat, and filled the ground, near its surface, with their eggs, in 

 most parts quite thickly; and in all of them we may expect more or less 

 injury next spring from the young locusts. 



With few exceptions the wheat was killed, and the ground will have to 

 be resown in the spring. Having, in my official reports, treated fully of 

 the means to be adopted to prevent the injury, I will simply state that they 

 are sufficient, with concert of action, to enable the farmer to protect his 

 crops from the unfledged insects. Yet a State bounty law for the collection 

 and destruction of the eggs and young insects would greatly assist, and 

 I would earnestly urge our Legislature to enact some such law as I have 

 suggested on page 138 of my last report. 



Against the winged hordes, as they sweep down from the northwest, 

 ?he farmer is powerless, and it is the manifest duty of Congress to make 

 some effort to palliate an evil which is national in its character. My views 

 that the destructive swarms that sweep down upon our fertile valley have 

 their origin in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwest, are well 

 known to the members of the Academy. They have been very generally 

 accepted as correct, and Dr. Packard, editor of the American Naturalist, 

 in an article of the present month's issue of that journal, though confessing 

 himself at first skeptical as to the correctness of those views, indorses them 

 since his visit to Kansas and Colorado in 1875. 



The insect is not indigenous to Missouri and many of the other Western 

 States that it occasionally devastates, and there is much yet to learn of its 

 native habitat and breeding-places. There is not only a possibility, but 

 a strong probability, that, by having the proper investigations made, we 

 may be able to prevent its incursions into the more fertile country. As I 

 have elsewhere remarked, "The fact that the agriculture of the United 

 States is of equal importance with all other interests of the country com- 

 bined, is so often asserted and admitted that it needs no enforcing. This 

 industry not only feeds our own 40,000,000 mouths, but supplies the staff 

 of life to millions in foreign lands. Surely, then, it is most important to 

 study and investigate those causes which affect it injuriously and arrest its 

 development, among which injurious insects play such an active part. 



"When, as in the past few years, the prosperity of nearly the whole 

 country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains is jeopardized, 

 and the whole Nation suffers most sensibly from locust ravages. National 

 measures should be taken to investigate the causes, and to endeavor to 

 prevent the recurrence of such disasters in the future. Congress owes it 

 to the farmers of the West that some effort be made to relieve them, as far 



