THOMAS ON ORTHOPTERA OF DAKOTA AND MONTANA. 49& 



the farmer. All modes of attack and defense which depend in any way 

 upon the knowledge of the habits of the insect which are not patent to 

 the unscientific eye, the entomologist is expected to perceive sooner than 

 those who are not entomologists. 



Although the farmer does not feel himself so helpless before the hatcbing 

 brood as he does before the migratory hordes, still that he does not feel 

 able to entirely control them, even after long experience, is shown by 

 the following extracts from a letter sent me this season by a Nebraska 

 farmer, who has some practical experience in the matter : — " I am a 

 hard working farmer, forty-six years old; came to Nebraska in 1855 ; 

 have a good farm and seven children, and would be getting along very 

 well if the grasshoppers would let me alone. They are getting worse 

 and we cannot stand it much longer. I only got five bushels of corn to 

 the acre last year, yet I had to help others ; and now we have millions 

 of ' hoppers' again. Plowing^ rolling and burning does but little good. 

 Wise men ^say there is a parasite killing them. Well, we know some- 

 thing of the ' hoppers' and the parasite; it n^ver kills many of them, 

 nor any of them until they are nearly grown. But the birds eat mil- 

 lions of them before they are larger than a grain of wheat. The small 

 grasshoppers are too quick for domestic fowls, but they get some of 

 them when they are small and many of the larger ones. I think the 

 birds have eaten half of those hatched on my farm, but they are getting 

 too large for them (date, June 2, 1875). The farmers will all tell you 

 the birds eat them, but they have killed many of the birds." 



First, the destruction of the eggs deposited. — In thickly settled countries, 

 where labor is cheap, and there are large landed estates, as France and 

 Italy, it may be possible to do this somewhat effectually, and it will effect 

 something even in our border States ; but when the invasion is general, 

 and the eggs are deposited over a large area, what can the farmers do 

 towards destroying them, not only on the farms, but on the much larger 

 area surrounding them? 



The following, from a French newspaper in 1841, will give some idea 

 of the work of collecting grasshoppers in Southern Europe : — " Such 

 immense quantities of grasshoppers have appeared this year in Spain 

 that they threaten in some places to entirely destroy the crops. At 

 Danriel, in the province of Cuidad-Real, three hundred persons are 

 constantly employed to collect these destructive insects, and though 

 they destroy seventy or eighty sacks every day, they do not appear to 

 diminish." This shows the number emi)loyed on a limited area. From 

 whence will come a corresponding force for the broad area of our border 

 States? 



As a practical test, let us take a county in Kansas, say Eice County, 

 which has an area of 720 square miles, and a population, according to 

 the last report of the Kansas Board of Agriculture, of 2,396, and a 

 voting population of 200 or 275. Suppose eggs to have been deposited 



