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was found last year, as we have already shown in the pages of Insect Life, damag- 
ing plums in Texas. The present spring, as reported hy Mr. F. E. Cunningham, it 
has been found puncturing half-grown peaches in the neighborhood of Brunswick, 
Ga. The normal food of this insect, as we have elsewhere shown, is a large thistle. 
Upon this plant it breeds, and when it occurs in injurious numbers in an orchard 
search should always be made for the normal food-plant, which should thereafter be 
watched and the young bugs destroyed by spraying with kerosene emulsion. 
Mauritian Sugar-cane Coccidae. — Miss Ormerod sends us some specimens of Coc- 
cidre from the Oriental Estates Company in Mauritius. One proves to be the original 
Icerya sacchari of Signoret (synonym of Icerya seychellarum Westwood), the species 
which Dr. leery reported as seriously damaging sugar-cane in Mauritius many years 
ago. On the lands of the Oriental Estates Company it occurred upon guava and not 
upon sugar-cane. Upon sugar-cane, however, was found another coccid, which 
proves to be a species, probably new, of the genus Westwoodia. This latter insect 
lives upon the roots of sugar-cane, and does serious damage. Is it possible that in 
the different handlings between Mauritius and Washington the labels have become 
changed and that the Westwoodia belongs on the guava and the Icerya on sugar-cane ? 
Leaf-beetle Injury to Orchard and Nut Trees in Florida. — A little leaf-beetle, 
Metachromaluridum 01., related to the strawberry root-borers, has this spring been 
reported from two localities in western Florida as injurious to nut and fruit-bearing 
trees. Mr. A. Faye, of Faye, Walton County, reported injury to pecan trees, a grove 
of several hundred trees being all more or less blackened, as if blighted. Mr. S. S. 
Harvey, of Quintette, Escambia County, reported damage last year to chestnut, on. 
the young sprouts and bloom. The present year, before the chestnuts put out leaves, 
they began on the buds of pear, cutting the stems of many leaves. They also did 
considerable damage to the fruit of early peaches, to the apricot, Japan walnut, and 
pecan. One entire grove of pecans was affected. 
A destructive Scale Insect new to the United States.— Our agent, Mr. Town- 
send, at Brownsville, Tex., has just found a mealy bug new to the United States in 
Dactylopius virgatus, said by Mr. Cockerell to be the most pestilential of Jamaican 
Coccidpe. Mr. Townsend found it upon " Jacobo " cactus. In Jamaica the species 
is nearly omnivorous and cotton is one of its food-plants. 
Further Damage by Cryptorhynchus lapathi. — Mr. E. V. Wilcox, of Cambridge, 
Mass., sent to this division during June specimens of the large curculionid, Cryptor- 
hynchus lapathi, in the larval and beetle states, with the statement that the larvae 
were present in large numbers in certain willows in that locality. The larva, our 
correspondent states, bores between the bark and the wood, the burrow being made 
in the growing wood and bark, usually in an horizontal plane about the stem and 
branches. 
Spread of another imported Snout-beetle. — The same correspondent sent with 
the bark and wood infested with Cryptorhynchus lapathi a single specimen of an 
imported otiorhynchid beetle, Barypithes (Exomias) pellucidus Boh. The former 
species, as we announced in the last number of Insect Life (p. 360), has recently been 
recognized in the suburbs of Boston, but the latter has not hitherto been found out- 
side of the neighborhood of New York City, where it was first taken in 1886. B. 
pellucidus is said to be very common in the environs of Paris, France, at the base of 
the cultivated strawberry. 
