ARMY WORM. 



405 



the white grub, give up the fields to the swine. While we may 

 bandage our grape-vines, fruit trees, and garden plants, and thus 

 protect them, and while we may bait the cut worms of clean 

 cultivated corn fields with bunches of grass poisoned with the 

 arsenites and thus kill tliem, or later dig them out at a profit, 

 none of these methods are available in the meadow. 

 Leiicania uiiipuiicta, Haw. Army Worm. 



Order LepUloptera. Family Noctuidae. 

 This inject is so largely the prey to insect enemies, parasitic 

 and predaceous, that it is only rarely that it docs marked injury. 

 Yet the entomologist knows that the moths are very common 

 each year, and there can be no doubt but that it does consider- 

 able injury in our grass fields every season. It is only when its 

 numbers, through favorable surroundings, become so immensely 

 numerous as to make it necessary for the caterpillars to swarm 

 forth from the meadows to get food, that we usually take note 

 of its presence or become conscious of its power for mischief. 



Fig. 15-'. 



The figures show well tlie appearance of the insect in its sev- 

 errl stages. The moth. Fig. 151, is yellowish-brown, often with 

 a greenish tinge with a discal white dot on each front wing, 

 Avhich gives the specific name. 



The caterpillar. Fig. 152, is striped longitudinally with dark 

 and light gray lines. It pupates like all noctuids in the earth. 



The moths are abundant in August and September. The eggs 

 are laid in the sheaths of the grass. The caterpillars are nearly 



