THE PALES WEEVIL. 71 



probably other kinds of pines, doing sometimes immense 

 injury to them. Wilson, the ornithologist, describes the 

 depredations of these insects, in Ms account * of the ivory- 

 billed woodpecker, in the following words : " Would it be 

 believed that the larvae of an insect, or fly, no larger than 

 a grain of rice, should silently, and in one season, destroy 

 some thousand acres of pine-trees, many of them from two 

 to three feet in diameter and a hundred and fifty feet 

 high ! Yet whoever passes along the high road from George- 

 town to Charleston, in South Carolina, about twenty miles 

 from the former place, can have striking and melancholy 

 proofs of the fact. In some places the whole woods, as far 

 as you can see around you, are dead, stripped of the bark, 

 their wintry-looking arms and bare trunks bleaching in the 

 smi, and tumbling in ruins before every blast, presenting a 

 frightful picture of desolation. Until some effectual prevent- 

 ive or more complete remedy can be devised against these 

 insects, and their larvae, I would humbly suggest the pro- 

 priety of protecting, and receiving with proper feelings of 

 gratitude, the services of this and the whole tribe of wood- 

 peckers, letting the odium of guilt fall to its proper owners." 

 Some years ago Mr. Nuttall kindly procured for me, near 

 the place above mentioned, specimens of the destructive in- 

 sects referred to by Wilson. They were of three kinds. 

 Those in greatest abundance were the Pales weevil. One 

 of the others was a larger, darker-colored weevil, without 

 white spots on it, and named Hyhbius picivorus by Ger- 

 mar and Schonherr, or the pitch-eating weevil; it is sel- 

 dom found in Massachusetts. The third was the white-pine 

 weevil, to be next described. It is said that these beetles 

 puncture the buds and the tender bark of the small branches, 

 and feed upon the juice, and that the young shoots are often 

 so much injured by them as to die and break off at the 

 wounded part. But it is in the larva state that they are 

 found to be most hurtful to the pines. The larvae live under 



* American Ornithology, Vol. IV. p. 21. 



