8 BULLETIN 746, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



The attention of English-speaking people was first called, in a scientific way, 

 to the ravages of a lepidopterous borer in sugar cane by the Rev. Lansdown 

 Guilding in his account of the insects infesting sugar cane, in the Transactions 

 of the Society of Arts, 1828, vol. xlvi, pp. 143-153. He described the insect as 

 Diatraea sacchari, and for his paper, which comprehended also an account of 

 the sugar-cane and palm weevils, he was awarded the gold Ceres medal of the 

 society. His studies were made in the Island of St. Vincent in the West Indies, 

 and from its occurrence there at this early date, and from Guilding's statement 

 that it had been long known, there is reason to suppose that the insect may be 

 an indigene of South America or of the West Indies, where the cultivation of 

 sugar cane was first begun in America. 



In 1856 a select committee, appointed to investigate the damage caused by 

 the cane borer in Mauritius, reported through W. Bojer, and the insect, which 

 is called in the report Proceras saccliaripliagus, was treated at some length, 

 and an account was given of its introduction into the island. In the same year 

 Westwood reviewed this report at length in the Gardeners' Chronicle of July 5, 

 gave a woodcut of the insect, and pointed out that it was probably identical 

 with the species described by Guilding at St. Vincent. He also called attention 

 to the fact that the species named many years previously by Fabricius as 

 Phalaena saccharalis is probably the same thing. This insect was described 

 by Fabricius (Entomologia systematica, vol. in, part 2, p. 238), from South 

 America, no more definite locality being given. The probabilities are, however, 

 that he refers to Dutch Guiana on account of the early settlement of that 

 country and from the fact that he refers to a figure of the larva by Myhlenfels. 

 He makes the statement that it feeds in sugar-cane, perforating and destroying 

 the stalks and becoming a pest in plantations. He describes the larva as six- 

 footed, of a pale hyaline color, and with the head and eight spots brown. The 

 larval description, however, is drawn from a figure by Myhlenfels, which may 

 have been inaccurate. As Fabricius's work was published in 1793, further evi- 

 dence is thus afforded that the insect is indigenous to the western hemisphere. 

 This insect still does similar damage in the vicinity of the original source of 

 our information, as is indicated by two articles by Miss Ormerod in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Entomological Society of London, 1879, xxxiii-xxxvi and 

 xxxvi-xl, and by reports of Mr. Im-Thurm, curator of the British Guiana 

 Museum at Georgetown, published some time previously, but which we have 

 not seen. 



In an added note to his Gardeners' Chronicle article, Westwood states that 

 according to information given him by "an intelligent Jamaica cane-grower" 

 the borer was very destructive in Jamaica some 15 years previously (1S42), 

 but that its ravages had been greatly checked by allowing the refuse to accumu- 

 late on the ground and then firing the whole plantation, the old roots subse- 

 quently throwing up more vigorous shoots. 



Mr. H. Ling Roth has studied what he believes to be the same species in 

 Queensland (Parasites of the Sugar-Cane, reprinted from the Sugar Cane, 

 March and April, 1SS5. London, 1S85). And in the same year M. A. Delteil 

 (La Canne a Sucre, Paris, 1885) treats of the Mauritius borer and considers it 

 to have been imported from Java, whereas the 1856 commission had considered 

 that it was derived from Ceylon. In IS90 Dr. W. Kruger published in the 

 Berichte der Versuchsstation fiir Zuckerrohr in West Java, Heft 1, Dresden, 

 1890, an account of the sugar-cane borers, and figures and describes a species 

 determined as Diatraea striatalis Snell., which almost precisely resembles our 

 species, and which he says occurs not only in Java, but also in Borneo, Sumatra, 

 and Singapore. In this same report another similar borer is described by 

 Snellen as ChUo injuscatelhm. 



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