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near by. The friend with whom I was staying belonged to the reportorial staff of 
one of the leading dailies in the city, and I was thus fortunate enough to be able to 
quickly sound the alarm. A few days later I again called the attention to the 
necessity of active measures being taken at once, and gave a detailed account of the 
insect in the same paper. Thus, I believe, I was the first to call the attention of the 
citizens to the pest, and by frequent short notices and telegrams sent at the request 
of the editor, public opinion was at last aroused so that in the spring 44,900 so-called 
"cocoons" were gathered by one boy. (I had suggested this method of interesting 
the school children in one of my communications.) This spring the prizes were 
larger and the work was vigorously pushed. Competition was close and when the 
time limit expired over 8,400,000 "cocoons" had been gathered by the children. 
The figures quoted from the American Cultivator represent only those "cocoons'' 
gathered by one school before May 10. The contest did not close until June 1, when 
one boy was credited with 3,038,713, and another boy with over 1,500,000! I was 
somewhat curious to know just what these " cocoons" were, so I asked the princi- 
pal of one school to send me a box just as they came in. I received a cigar box 
packed full and said to contain 2,000. It was a very dirty mess, as they had evi- 
dently been gathered in the vicinity of car-shops or other large coal-burning manu- 
factories, so I did not question the accuracy enough to count them. I especially 
desired to find out how many of the "cocoons" were egg-masses among the stated 
2,000 " cocoons." Most of the mass did consist of the cocoons of the male moth, all 
empty, of course. The city papers have reported the pest greatly reduced in num- 
bers this summer as compared with other years. There is no doubt that the $600 
expended in prizes by the Genesee Valley Forestry Association this spring was the 
cheapest and most e ective method of checking this pest that could have been used. 
A NEW ZEALAND MOTH-CATCHING PLANT. 
In our article upon the codling moth, in the annual report of this 
Department for 1887, we referred on page 98, to the insect-catching 
properties of the flowers of the different species of Physianthus, and to 
the interesting suggestion of a possible use for these plants as codling 
moth trap sin New Zealand by Dr. Cheeseman, of the Auckland Museum^ 
and Mr. J. T. Campbell, IT. S. consul at Auckland. We further stated 
that a very large number of specimens of moths captured by these plants 
were received from Mr. Campbell, but among them were no codling 
moths. In Science Gossip for October, 1894, Mr. W. M. Maskell, of 
the University of New Zealand, at Wellington, publishes an interesting 
article upon this subject, identifying the principal moth catching plant 
of New Zealand as Araugia albens. It is a native of the Gape of Good 
Hope, and was accidentally introduced into New Zealand. It captures 
such moths as visit the flowers for nectar, the proboscis of the moth 
being clasped by two pincer-like organs. Mr. Maskell states that a 
plant of Araugia covering a space 10 yards in length may frequently 
destroy as many as hundreds of moths in a night, and consequently 
prevent the ravages of fifty times as many larvse. The varieties of 
moths are not indicated, but the statement is made that the codling 
moth does not frequent the plant. 
