168 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



some peculiar recommendation. I have seen lauds in this state which have produced 

 fifty bushels an acre of this most excellent of the cerealia. 



In the Transactions of the Linnsean Society, it is stated, that the blight of wheat, 

 (uredo frumenti,) in the west of England, which was attributed to an insect, was owing to 

 a fungus which had been long sown in the stem of the wheat. Sir Joseph Banks, in an 

 excellent essay on the blight in corn, annexed to Curtis's Practical Observations on the 

 British Grasses, has embraced the same opinion, and says, that the blight is occasioned 

 by the growth of a minute parasitic fungus, or mushroom, on the leaves, stems, and 

 glumes of the living plant ; and he further states, that it has long been admitted by far- 

 mers, though scarcely credited by botanists, that wheat, in the neighbourhood of a bar- 

 berry bush, seldom escapes the blight; that the village of Rollesby, in Norfolk, where 

 barberries abound, and wheat seldom succeeds, is called by the opprobrious appellation 

 of mildew Rollesby ; that some observing men have, of late, attributed this very per- 

 plexing effect to the farina of the flowers of the barberry, which is, in truth, yellow, and 

 resembles, in some degree, the appearance of the rust, or what is presumed to be the 

 blight, in its early state, and that it is notorious to all botanical observers, that the 

 leaves of the barberry are very subject to the attack of a yellow parasitic fungus, larger, 

 but otherwise much resembling, the rust in corn. In opposition to the idea, that it is 

 improbable that these fungi are the same, it is remarked that the misletoe, the best known 

 parasitic plant, delights most to grow on the apple and hawthorn, in England, but that it 

 flourishes occasionally on trees widely differing in their nature from both of these ; and in 

 the middle states of America it is most frequently found on the nyssa sylvatica, or sour 

 gum, but to the southward upon oaks. 



An insect, called the tipula tritici, or wheat insect, has destroyed, in some places in 

 England, about one twentieth part of the produce. An insect, called the ichneumon 

 tipula?, deposites its egg in the larva, or caterpillar, of the wheat fly, and this destroys it. 

 Dr. Darwin gravely proposes, in his Phytologia, to counteract the pernicious effects of 

 insects which produce blight, by propagating the larva of the aphidivorous fly. It is 

 not yet settled whether the hessian fly is of foreign or domestic origin: although a spe- 

 cies of tipula, yet it is not the one just mentioned, as I am informed. The farmers on 

 Long Island complain of the septennial ravages of an insect which destroys their barley, 

 and which they denominate the army worm, from its numbers. 



Dr. Barton has very justly remarked, that it is an object of the flrst importance to 

 investigate the natural history of those insects, which are peculiarly injurious to us in any 

 way, and that unfortunately our country, as much perhaps as any on this globe, abounds 

 with such insects. 



