ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



29 



example thus set for him, this is no part of nature's handiwork. Though the Cross of 

 St. George may now proudly float from the one side, and the Stars and Stripes as proudly 

 respond to the northern breezes from the other side ; though there may be martialled, 

 armed hosts on either side, the coats of one being red and the other blue, this is but 

 following in the footsteps of the uncivilized aborigine, and not in the pathway of nature. 



The feathered migrants of the air will, each recurring spring, make their way from 

 the far south and rear their young in your woods and fields and along your inland lakes 

 and streams, gathering their progeny together and making their way southward again in 

 autumn, though a Queen might issue her edicts and a President promulgate his orders to 

 the contrary. Again, the finny tribes of the sea and lakes seek their food and deposit 

 their spawn wherever their inclinations and a favorable situation may tempt them, wholly 

 unconscious of the tribulations that they bring upon the enthusiastic angler from the 

 cities of the United States, who suddenly finds himself and his craft in the hands of 

 British law in case he attempts to follow them. The moose, the wild deer, the wolf and 

 the bear are no less free to go and come, roving northward or southward as their inclin- 

 ations prompt them, totally ignorant of the terrors lurking in invisible, arbitrary lines 

 and the questionings of custom house officers ; for these are the belongings of men and 

 not of nature. 



In the light of what has been stated, then, it may be said that at present Canada 

 and the United States are separated by an imaginary, arbitrary, political line, which we 

 as subjects of two powerful nations are bound to respect in matters outside of natural 

 science, but it seems to me that the naturalist must be permitted to demand that this 

 condition is not allowed to extend farther. We are dealing with nature, and nature, as 

 has been shown, knows no national lines. With us, as entomologists, the fact that we 

 are all Americans must stand paramount to any other considerations. America is 

 separated more or less widely from other portions of the world by depths of sea, which 

 form a far more effective barrier to insect migrations than any that human minds can 

 conceive or human hands erect. Unaided by man or his agents, but few insects could 

 make their way from the eastern to the western hemisphere, or vice versa, though those 

 neo-tropical might and probably have, unaided by man, spread from thence northward 

 into the nearctic regions. Two illustrations of these last will suffice, one the Harlequin 

 Cabbage Bug, Murgantia histrionica (Fig. 1), 

 known to inhabit Central America and the West 

 Indies, has lately pushed its way northward, in 

 Ohio, to within twenty miles of Lake Erie, or to 

 about Lat. 30° 15' N , while the Chinch Bug, Blis- 

 sus leucopterus (Fig. 2, highly magnified), in all 

 probability originally a neo-tropical species, has, 

 \ as you know, spread northward over a portion of the Dominion of 

 Canada, and while it has not as yet been known to depredate upon 

 your crops to any noticeable degree, yet it may do so in the future, 

 in which case it may be expected to first make its presence known 

 in your timothy meadows rather than in your grain fields, and quite 

 likely will work considerable injury before it is recognized by your 

 agriculturists. Another phase of this problem of insect migration is 

 illustrated by the Colorado Potato Beetle, Doryphora desemlineata, which at one time 

 was restricted to the country about the base of the Rocky Mountains, and its food-plant 

 consisted of vegetation having no economic value. But now came the eastern emigrant 

 farmer with his indispensable potato, a plant closely allied to the nataral food-plaut of 

 this insect, and thus the potato patches of the settlers became as so many stepping-stones 

 to the beetles and enabled them to make their way eastward to the Atlautic coast and 

 Canada, transcontinental railways probably hastening their arrival, a3 they are shown to 

 have appeared along the lines of railways earlier than elsewhere. So much for this 

 aspect of the problem, but let us now tumour attention toward some o her phas33 of a 

 more international character. 



Fig. 1. 



