34 USEFUL BIRDS. 
for fourteen years following the civil war was estimated at 
fifteen million dollars per year.! 
In 1873 the injury to the cotton crop reached twenty-five 
million dollars, and later averaged from twenty-five million 
to fifty million dollars annually.2. Now a new enemy, the 
Mexican cotton boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), threatens 
equal destruction. 
The Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) began 
to destroy crops as soon as the country it inhabits was set- 
tled, and is still injurious. From time to time its enormous 
flights have traversed a great part of the Mississippi valley. 
It reached a maximum of destructiveness from 1874 to 1877, 
when the total loss from its. ravages in Kansas, Nebraska, 
Iowa, Missouri, and neighboring States, including injury by 
depression of business and general ruin, was estimated at 
two hundred million dollars.? 
In those years this devastating insect swept over the Missis- 
sippi valley. Wherever its vast flights alighted or its young 
developed, they destroyed nearly all vegetation, ruining 
great numbers of farmers, causing a famine in the land, and 
driving many people to emigration. This was an extreme 
calamity, such as is not likely to occur again. 
A still larger but more widely distributed loss from insect 
pests, however, is still borne annually by the American 
people. Dr. Lintner states his belief that the annual and 
periodical injury caused by cutworms in the United States 
is greater than that caused by the Rocky Mountain locust. 
In September, 1868, Prof. D. B. Walsh, editor of the 
American Entomologist, estimated that the country then 
suffered to the amount of three hundred million dollars 
annually from the depredations of noxious insects. By the 
census of 1875 the agricultural products of this country were 
valued at two billion, five hundred million dollars. Of this 
* Fourth Report of the United States Entomological Commission, by C. V. - 
Riley, 1885, p. 3. 
2 Report on the Rocky Mountain Locust, by A. S. Packard. Ninth Annual 
Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Terri- 
tories, 1875, p. 591. 
3 Report on the Rocky Mountain Locust, by Riley, Packard, and Thomas. 
First Report of the United States Entomological Commission, 1877, pp. 115-122. 
