198 Forty-fifth Report on the State Museum. 



haps be accomplished in this manner: After the ground has received 

 the thorough breaking up and working over in the autumn and spring 

 above recommended, follow with a crop of buckwheat. Wonderful 

 efficacy has been claimed for this plant in freeing ground from wire- 

 worms. Of the abundant testimony that might be quoted on this 

 point, we will only give that of the late Hon. A. B. Dickinson, who 

 has stated as follows: 



" After experimenting with salt and lime, and many other things 

 recommended, I have found only one remedy for the rascals, and that 

 is to break the sod and sow it to buckwheat. Plow'late, and as often as 

 possible, in the fall, and then sow it to pease in the spring. With a like 

 plowing the next fall, they will not injure any crop the following 

 season." 



3. Mustard Remedy. — In England a crop of mustard is regarded by 

 many as an absolute specific against the wire-worm. In an address 

 before an agricultural society there, the speaker, after narrating some 

 successful experiments which he had made with mustard, on a small 

 scale, made the following explicit statement: 



" Thus encouraged by these results, I sowed with mustard the next 

 year a whole field of forty-two acres, which had never repaid me for 

 nineteen years, in consequence of nearly every crop having been 

 destroyed by the wire- worm. I am warranted in stating that not a 

 single roire-worm could be found the folloioing year, and the crop of 

 wheat throughout was superior to any that »I have grown for twenty- 

 one years ! " 



As possibly some of the readers of the Country Gentleman may not 

 distinguish between the wire-worm, the cut- worm, and the "thousand- 



Fig. 38.— Larva of Agriotes Fig. 39.— Larva of Melanotus communis. (After 



mascus. (After Fitch.) Fitch ) 



legged" worm, it maybe desirable to state that the first-named is a 

 small (usually less than an inch in length), slender, flattened creature, 

 with shining surface, and often of a horn-color or pale brown or 

 yellowish shade; its texture is tough and leathery. The first three 

 segments of the body are each furnished with a pair of rather long 

 four-jointed legs, while the last segment bears a single retractile proleg. 

 Figures 38 and 39 are rude representations of two of the common 

 species — Figure 38 being the Agriotes maneus of Say (regarded by Dr. 

 Fitch as A. truncatus of Melsheimer), and Figure 39, Melanotus com- 



