324 REPORT 



In the fall of 1846 Mr. Affleck, knowing of Say's name and descrip- 

 tion of the moth, wrote to Dr. T. W. HarriSj the Kew England ento- 

 mologist, sending specimens of the moth, together with the request that 

 he would redescribe it and place it in its proper ^'modern" genus 

 Harris was at a loss, as he had nothing in his collection similar to it, and 

 so he forwarded the specimens to Edward Doubleday, a celebrated Eng- 

 lish lepidopterist. Doubleday showed the specimens to the London 

 Entomological Society, and answered Harris that the species would fit 

 in no modern genus, but that it came nearest to Ophiusa. This opinion 

 Harris transmitted to Affleck as his own. The whole correspondence 

 forms rather an interesting chapter in the history of the Cotton Worm. 

 Affleck's original letter to Harris has not, so far as we can find, been 

 published ; but the gist of the lattcr's final reply can be found in an ex- 

 cellent article in Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac for 1851, in which the 

 moth is designated as Opliiusa [Noctua) xyUna. Harris's letter to Double- 

 day and the latter's reply will be found in Harris' Entomological Cor- 

 respondence, Boston, 1809, and Doubleday's remarks upon the specimens 

 before the London Entomological Society are to be found in the Pro- 

 ceedings of that society for 1848. 



Mr. Affleck's article, though short, is an excellent one. In his 1846 

 article he had advocated the hibernation of the pupse, but this he now 

 rejected, and, from actual observation, published the fact that the moth 

 hibernates. He also, in the 1851 article, gives the first figure ever pub- 

 lished of a parasite of the Cotton Worm — probably Pimpla conquisitor. 



In 1854 two palmers of a certain degree of interest were published. 

 B. C. L. Wailes, in his 1854 report on the Agriculture and Geology of 

 Mississippi, article Cotton, devoted a short space to the consideration 

 of the caterpillar, and accompanied it by a colored plate illustrating the 

 different stages. The principal interest of the paper arises from the cu- 

 rious mistake which Mr. Wailes made in the scientific name of the moth. 

 He calls it JDepressaria gossyinoides. This name he must have gotten 

 from seeing somewhere an account of the East Indian Cotton Boll-worm, 

 the JDepressaria gossypiella of Saunders. Still the habits of this insect 

 are so different from those of our Cotton Worm that is very difficult to 

 see how he could suppose them identical. As for the remainder of the 

 article there is nothing in it that is not twenty years behind its time. 



The other 1854 article which we would mention was published by 

 Dr. W. I. Burnett in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural 

 History. Here again, for the third time, was put forth the migration 

 theory. Whether it was his own idea or whether he picked it up among 

 the planters of South Carolina and Georgia, whither he went for a num- 

 ber of winters for his health, is difficult to say, but the latter is more 

 probable. The whole paper seems to have been written mainly from 

 hearsay, and contains a number of mistakes which Dr. Burnett would 

 hardly have made from his own observations. 



In the autumn of 1853 or 1854 Mr. Townend Glover went South to 



J 



