M2 



Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 



upon the extent to which the country is given to grain growing. 

 "C. L. W.," in the "Farmers' Review," (Chicago, 111.) Nov. 2nd, 

 1887, states that he had been farming in Smith county, Kansas, ever 

 since the county was first settled, and the first crop of corn that he 

 raised there was planted on sod, (/. e. recently broken virgin soil) 

 and was covered with chinch bugs though there was no grain to 

 speak of within one hundred miles of the field. I have found it in 

 the alluvial portions of Louisiana, where very little corn, only, is 

 grown, far more abundant than in Northern Indiana, where the 

 area devoted to grain growing is vastly more extensive, while in 

 the latter region it was not one per cent, as numerous as in por- 

 tions of Illinois where the area cultivated to grains was no more 

 extensive ; all of the localities being topographically much alike in 

 character. In 1894, Dr. J. C. Neal, of Stillwater, Oklahoma, wrote 

 me that he had found these bugs in that territory, miles from human 

 habitation, in immense numbers and at the roots of the native grasses. 

 In 1854, Dr, Fitch found them in autumn, in Northern Illinois, amidst 

 extensive prairies, where, on parting the grass, the ground was covered 

 and swarming with them 1 . The outbreak in New Yofk, in 1882 and 

 1 883', was not in the grain fields but in timothy meadows. In 1884, 

 Mr. W. H. Harrington, took it abundantly along the sea shore, at 

 Sydney, Cape Breton, clustered on bunches of grass*. Prof. Otto 

 Lugger, found them destroying timothy near the shores of Vermillion 

 Lake in Northern Minnesota, where the only agricultural product 

 besides was potatoes 4 . In his short paper in Insect Life, Vol. VII., 

 pp. 232-234, 1894, Mr. C. L. Marlatt, calls attention to the fact that 

 in Kansas he found these insects hibernating in great numbers in the 

 dense stools of some of the native grasses. So marked was this 

 hibernating habit that Mr. Marlatt questioned if this was not the 

 " normal and ancient habit of the species, the natural food-plant of 

 which, before the advent of the white man and the growth of cereals, 

 must have been some of the native grasses." In commenting on Mr. 

 Marlatt's note, in Insect Life, Vol. VII., p. 420, Mr. E. A. Schwarz 

 states that " the same habit of clustering about the roots of tufts of 

 grass is at present to be observed along the Atlantic coast from Cape 



1. First, Second Report, Insects of New York, p. 283. 



2. Lintner, Second Report, State Entomologist, N. Y., p. 159. 



3. Can. Ent. Vol. XXVI, p. 218. 



4. Bull. 37, University of Minn., 1895. 



