405 
ing together of the pillow they gradually work themselves into the 
cloth covering in which they are held by their microscopic retrorse ser- 
rations. To one who looks at a fine specimen of this accidental felting 
there can not fail to come the suggestion that feathers could be com- 
mercially used in this way. The matter has been occasionally referred 
to in print, notably in the American Naturalist for December, 1882, and 
in INSECT LIFE, Vol. II, pp. 317-318. 
DAMAGE TO CARNATIONS BY THE VARIEGATED CUT-WORM. 
According to the American Florist of February 25, Mr. Edwin Lons- 
dale read a paper before the then recent meeting of the American Car- 
nation Society, in which he described an interesting case of damage in 
a hothouse to the buds of carnations. The damage was done by the 
half-grown larvee of Argrotis saucia. Four or five hundred buds were 
destroyed in one house in less than a month. By spraying with Paris 
green and by persistent search for the larve at night further damage 
was averted. 
This is evidently another case of an introduction of cut-worms into 
a hothouse with new soil in the fall. It is a matter of great importance 
that new soil brought into hothouses should either be sterilized or that 
it should be procured in spring and left in heaps from which all vege- 
tation should be carefully removed throughout the entiresummer. By 
fall all cut-worms will have deserted the heaps and the earth can then 
be safely used. An instance of an almost precisely similar character 
has been brought to our knowledge near Washington and the source of 
infestation was clearly traced to earth taken in the fall from beneath 
sod in a pasture field which was badly infested with cut-worms. 
A LARCH ENEMY. 
In one of Mr. John G. Jack’s interesting series of articles, entitled 
‘‘ Notes of a Summer Journey in Europe” (Garden and Forest, Feb- 
ruary 24, 1892, p. 87), he writes from Berlin that the European Lareh 
is Sometimes seriously injured and often killed by the larva of a lit- 
tle moth (Coleophora laricella), which eats out all the interior of the 
leaves, leaving only the dry, hard, shriveled epidermis. The intro- 
duced Japanese Larch, however, is not affected by the pest. Accord- 
ing to Mr. Jack this same insect has been introduced into Massachu- 
setts for a number of years, and its ravages have been sometimes quite 
noticeable in the Arnold arboretum. The Japanese Larch is also immune 
in this country. 
HESSIAN FLY IN NEW ZEALAND 
As we reported in Vol. 1 of INSEcr LIFE, the Hessian Fly was first 
authentically determined as occurring in New Zealand in 1888. The 
locality in which it occurred was at that time somewhat restricted, but 
