36 USEFUL BIRDS. 
States Department of Agriculture for 1904, gives the loss 
from insect depredations for that year as seven hundred and 
ninety-five million, one hundred thousand dollars; and this 
is believed to be a conservatiwe estimate of the tax now im- 
posed by injurious insects on the people of the United States, 
without reckoning the millions of dollars that are expended 
annually in labor and insecticides in the fight against insects.1 
LOSSES BY INSECT RAVAGES IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
The proportion of this loss that Massachusetts is called 
upon to bear has not received the attention that it deserves. 
Some figures, however, may be given. In 1861 the army 
worm (probably Heliophila unipuncta) swept eastern Mas- 
sachusetts. The damage done to crops, according to Dr. 
Packard, exceeded five hundred thousand dollars.2, We have 
no estimates of the loss occasioned by more recent invasions 
of thisinsect. Prof. C. H. Fernald? estimates that an amount 
of cranberries equal to one-third the possible crop of the Cape 
Cod region is annually destroyed by insects. Thus a sum 
not less than five hundred thousand dollars is yearly lost to 
the people of that region. 
In 1890 Dr. Henry H. Goodell, president of the Massa- 
, chusetts Agricultural College, stated that it was costing the 
farmers of the United States two million dollars, and the 
farmers of Massachusetts eighty thousand dollars, each year, 
to hold the Colorado potato beetle in check by the use of 
Paris green.* 
In 1901 Hon. J. W. Stockwell, then secretary of the 
Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, asked me to esti- 
mate the annual loss to the Commonwealth through the rav- 
ages of insect pests. My estimate, which seemed to me at 
1 The Annual Loss occasioned by Destructive Insects in the United States, by 
C. L. Marlatt. Yearbook, United States Department of Agriculture, 1904, p. 464. 
® First Report on Injurious and Beneficial Insects of Massachusetts, by A. S. 
Packard. Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, 1870, 
Part I, p. 353. 
3 In Bulletin No. 19 of the Hatch Experiment Station of the Massachusetts 
Agricultural College, Professor Fernald gives statistics of the cranberry crop, 
and evidence from which his estimate is made. 
4 Agricultural Education, by H. H. Goodell. Sixth Annual Report of the 
Rhode Island State Board of Agriculture, 1891, p. 186. 
