85 



and to be reasonably industrious we would still be considerably in the 

 dark. Last autumn, as the ground was rather dry during the season 

 of wheat sowing, I thought surely that this year would show a marked 

 decrease in injury by the Hessian fly, for the reason that seed germi- 

 nated very slowly and the plants did not appear above ground, excei)t 

 in damp places, until very late. 



Fortunately, I did not make any jmblic statements to this effect, and 

 luckily so, for this pest has not been so destructive in Ohio during the 

 last thirty-five years as it has been the present summer, and only a 

 comparatively i'ew tields escaped injury, at least so far as personal 

 observation revealed, and these were either among the later sown or 

 on low, rich ground, where drought and lack of fertility did not empha- 

 size the work of the fly. Last fall there was nothing to indicate this 

 outbreak, and I believe the chief element in causing the unusual abun- 

 dance of the spring brood Avas the meteorological conditions during 

 April and May, which, if we fully understood their influence, would 

 prove to have been unfavorable to the natural enemies and favorable 

 to the development of the pest itself. Whatever the cause may have 

 been, we have a further illustration of the frightful risk one runs in 

 attemi)ting to foretell the future in regard to injurious insects, for by 

 so doing we only pit ourselves against subtle influences that we do not 

 as yet begin to understand. Professor Lugger recently asked me how 

 the Hessian fly could inhabit a country where there was neither grain 

 nor grass growing for six months of the year. I replied by asking him 

 the same question, and myself the one that has i)resented itself to me 

 again and again, viz, Must it not necessarily be single-brooded in the 

 North? 



In May reports came in myriads regarding an outbreak of cutworms 

 that seemed to cover the southern half of the State, gradually disap- 

 pearing toward the northern i)ortion. A very conspicuous feature of 

 the larvai of this species, Feltia hcrilis, as determined by Mr. Howard, 

 was its nomadic nature, great numbers moving across highways and 

 pathways almost as does the true army worm, excepting that in this 

 case the worms did not move so regularly forward, but were more 

 inclined to run about, hither and yon, as if with no objective point in 

 view. In very many cases these larva' were spoken of as the army 

 worm, and the most of my correspondents considered them as such, at 

 least for a time. 



Now, while all of this was going on in the southern part of the State, 

 the northern farmer was practically unmolested and only knew of his 

 brother farmers' misfortune as he read of it in the papers. But in the 

 nieiinwhile an enemy as devastating in its efl'ects and even less easily 

 managed was lurking in the grass lands, in the shape of several species 

 of webworms, larva' of species of Crambus. These webworms were 

 more abundant over the northern portion of the State, gradually 

 decreasing to the southward, overlapping, as it were, Ftltia lurilis, and 



