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which he sent to the Smithsonian and received in exchange for it a 
few days after a check for $1,500, probably had its origin in a state- 
ment which we published over a year ago that the expedition to Aus- 
tralia in search of Vedalia cost some $1,500; in other words, that 
Vedalia might be called a fifteen-hundred-dollar insect. This curious | 
error is equaled by one which we have just noticed in a recent (New 
York) paper, where the following statement is made: “It is esti- 
mated that the cereal crop of Canada has been damaged fully 
$38,000,000 by insects.” This is a plain perversion of a statement 
made by Mr. James Fletcher in his annual address as president of the 
Association of Economic Entomologists, delivered at the meeting held 
in Washington in August last, and which has received wide newspaper 
comment. Mr. Fletcher, however, said that one-tenth of the agricul- 
tural product of the United States, namely, an amount of the value of 
$380,000,000, is lost through insect ravages. By avery general error in 
the first newspaper statements concerning this address, the amount was 
placed at $38,000,000 instead of $380,000,000. Since then the fact that 
Mr. Fletcher is Dominion Entomologist of Canada seems to have been 
responsible for the mistake of transferring this loss from the United 
States to Canada, while in some manner the damage, instead of apply- 
ing to the total agricultural product, has been restricted to the cereal 
crop. This is a striking illustration of the worthlessness of many of 
such uncredited statements in the newspapers and of the manner 
in which newspaper paragraphs are sometimes evolved. 
A NOTE ON PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY. 
Mr. E. B. Poulton and Mr. W. H. Blandford brought out two inter- 
esting points at the meeting of the Entomological Society of London, 
June 3, 1891 (Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1891, part 3, pp. xv—xvi). Mr. 
Poulton announced that with the assistance of Prof. Meldola he had 
ascertained that the hardened walls of the cocoons of Hriogaster lanes- 
tris—the common small Eggar Moth of England—are produced not 
by tightly woven silk alone, but by a loose and open framework of silk, 
over which a paste of calcium oxalate is poured from the malpighian 
tubules and also probably from the anus. Mature larvee were exhib-— 
ited, dissected so as to show that the malpighian tubules were injected 
Ww ith a chalky secretion, the oxalate of lime. 
Mr. Blandford said tna he had himself verified the statement that 
uric acid can be detected in the malpighian tubules of insects, and Mr. 
McLachlan agreed that the demonstration that these organs are renal 
_ organs is now satisfactory. This discussion seems to us rather remark- 
able, since, although the malpighian tubules were at first considered as 
biliary in their function, the chemical determination of uric acid in these 
organs was demonstrated in the case of Sericaria mori as early as 1816 
by Brugnatelli and Wurzer. 
