23 
he having in numerous instances watched the fly in the very act 
of ovipositing. Ata later day Mr. T. has favored the public 
with a more full and exact description of this process. (Culti- 
vator, viii., p. 82.) James Worth of Pennsylvania, also in 1820 
minutely described from his personal observations, the situation 
of the egg, its hatching, and the journey of the worm down the 
leaf to its usual nidus. (American Farmer, ii., 180.) 
In the second volume of the Memoirs of the New York Board 
of Agriculture, issued in 1823, is a communication (p. 169-171) 
on the Hessian fly, from Judge Hickock, who deems a fertile soil 
the best safeguard. In the third volume of the same work, pub- 
lished in 1826, (p. 326-338,) is a paper by the indefatigable 
secretary of the board, the late Judge Buel, giving a condensed 
summary of all the information respecting this insect, contained 
in the accounts of Judge Havens, Dr. Chapman, and the different 
writers in the American Farmer. : 
In 1840, Miss Margaretta H. Morris, of Germantown, Pa., in 
a communication to the American Philosophical Society, revives 
the theory of “a landholder,” already noticed, that the ege of the 
fly is deposited in the grain, and that obtaining seed from unin- 
fected districts will therefore be the best safeguard. The report 
of the committee upon this paper, is inserted in the society’s pro- 
ceedings of November, 1840, and the paper itself is published in 
the society’s Transactions (vol. viii., p.49-51). Communications 
bearing upon the same subject were also made to the Academy 
of Natural Sciences, in 1841, by Dr. B. H. Coates. (Proceedings 
Alcad., vol. i., p. 45, 54 and 57.) 
In 1841, Mr. E. C. Herrick, librarian of Yale College, gives 
“a brief, preliminary account of the Hessian fly, and its parasites,” 
in Silliman’s Journal of Science (vol. xli., p. 153-158). This 
paper announces the interesting fact of Mr. Dana’s having met 
with apparently the same insect on the shores of the Mediterra- 
nean, details the writer’s own accurate observations of the changes 
from the egg to the flax seed state, and enumerates four different 
parasitic insects that prey upon it during these periods of its existence, 
by which “probably more than nine-tenths of every generation of 
