Pt ee tae SS 
THE COTTON WORM. 723 
praiseworthy efforts for the advancement of knowledge and the 
consequent amelioration of his race. 
In the Second Report on the Insects of Missouri, Professor C. 
V. Riley notices the cotton worm, and illustrates the moth by a 
wooucut, in which the insect’is represented head downward in a 
state of rest. The moth is drawn in this position on the authority 
of a gentleman in Texas, and the subject is treated throughout, 
and indeed necessarily, by Professor Riley, at second-hand. In 
Professor Riley’s Sixth Report (published this year) the cotton 
worm is again discussed under similar conditions, while the posi- 
tion of the moth in a state of rest has now become normal. It is 
however claimed, in this Report, that the cotton worm ‘ hiber- 
nates” as a moth, and the credit of this observation is given to 
the Second Report, while the discovery of the fact is claimed to 
have been, Mane by what Professor Riley calls the process of 
“ analo 
It is the object of the present paper to throw, happily, some 
light on the biography of the cotton worm as it occurs in the 
Southern States, and in so doing I think it will become apparent 
that Professor C. V. Riley has regarded the same subject from an 
erroneous standpoint, having considered the cotton worm as be- 
longing to our fauna, and accordingly misunderstood its economy 
-as displayed with us and far from its natural abode. And here, 
while I am obliged to differ on a scientific question with Prof. 
Riley, I bear willing testimony to the great good achieved by the 
publication of the Missouri Reports. 
The Aletia argillacea, or cotton worm, is an insect belonging to 
the Noctuæ, a group of nocturnal moths. It is one of a number 
of intertropical or southern forms, somewhat nearly allied to our 
more thickly scaled and northern genus Plusia. The caterpillar 
is a “half-looper,” to use a common term, and the chrysalis 
is held within an exceedingly loose web on the plant, the few 
threads usually binding over the edge of the leaf and of them- 
selves furnishing’ no adequate protection to the pupa. [I here 
exhibit to the Association specimens of the larva, pupa and moth 
_ of Aletia]. Technical descriptions of the different stages are al- 
ready extant and so may be passed over here. The more imme- 
= diate question for our solution is the consecutive history of the 
_ insect, so that we may be prepared to offer suggestions to the 
agriculturists for its destruction. 
