THE SAN JOSE SCALE 
A Brief Popular Account of a Notorious Insect Pest, with 
a Statement of its Present Recorded Status 
. in North Carolina* 
BY FRANKLIN SHERMAN, JR. 
About three years ago, two prominent amateur collectors of 
insects, each an authority in his chosen group, were in this state 
on a brief collecting trip, and, by arrangement, I met them and 
spent a day in their company. It chanced that the orchards 
throughout all that neighborhood (Southern Pines) are infested 
with the San Jose Scale, and when I mentioned this fact quite 
incidently, both immediately expressed great interest and desire 
to see the pest, saying that they had often heard of it but had 
never seen it or received any first-hand information concerning it. 
Yet this insect is so notorious a pest, that among economic ento- 
mologists the discussion of it is now almost debarred, by mutual 
consent and unwritten law, from the public meetings. One year 
ago, at the sixth annual meeting of our Academy at Chapel Hill, 
Dr. Butler gave a discussion of the Cattle Tick, a pest of wide dis- 
tribution and of tremendous economic importance to the live- 
stock interests of the southern states, and while none of the facts 
which he gave could in any wise be regarded as new and original 
contributions to science, yet the paper was received with manifest 
interest by our Academy. 
These facts have convinced me that however desirable it may 
be to present at our meetings the results of really new and original 
*Read before the North Carolina Academy of Science, May 2, 1908. 
['June 
