170 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



that the wheat crops were not materially injured by it 

 before the year 1788. Though these insect hordes tra- 

 verse such a tract of country in the course of the year, 

 their flights are not more than five or six feet at a time. 

 Nothing intercepts them in their destructive career, nei- 

 ther mountains nor the broadest rivers. They were seen 

 to cross the Delaware like a cloud. The numbers of this 

 fly were so great, that in wheat-harvest the houses swarm- 

 ed with them to the extreme annoyance of the inhabitants. 

 They filled every plate or vessel that was in use ; and 

 five hundred were counted in a single glass tumbler ex- 

 posed to them a few minutes with a little beer in it a . 



America suffers also in its wheat and maize from the 

 attack of an insect of a different order; which, for what 

 reason I know not, is called the chintz-bug-fly. It ap- 

 pears to be apterous, and is said in scent and colour to re- 

 semble the bed-bug. They travel in immense columns from 

 field to field, like locusts destroying every thing as they 

 proceed ; but their injuries are confined to the states south 

 of the 4-Oth degree of north latitude b . From this account 

 the depredator here noticed should belong to the tribe of 

 Cimicidee ,■ but it seems very difficult to conceive how an 

 insect that lives by suction, and has no mandibles, could 

 destroy these plants so totally. 



When the wheat blossoms, another marauder, to which 

 Mr. Marsham first called the attention of the public, takes 

 its turn to make an attack upon it, under the form of an 

 orange-coloured gnat, which, introducing its long retrac- 

 tile ovipositor into the centre of the corolla, there deposits 

 its eggs. These being hatched, the larvae, perhaps by 



a Eneyclopced. Britann. viii. 489-95. 



b Young's Annals of Agriculture, xi. 4/L 



