lOO 



AN ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY. 



green vegetation ; fruits like cranberries are occasionally eaten 

 into, and sometimes roots or tubers are attacked ; but the injury 

 is rarely of economic importance. 



Crickets are pugnacious as a rule, occasionally eating their 

 companions, or such other soft-bodied specimens as fall in their 

 way, while "cricket-fights" are not unknown in the lists of sports. 



The tree-crickets, CEca^ithus, are more slender and graceful 

 than any of the preceding, and more ready fliers. They are 

 green, yellowish, or gray in color, and live on trees or shrubs, 

 feeding chiefly upon plant-Hce and other soft-bodied insects of 

 various kinds. They lay their eggs in the stems of pithy plants 

 like blackberry and raspberry, puncturing the wood by means of 

 their powerful, auger-like ovipositor. Quite often these punctured 

 canes die, but practically little damage is done unless the insects 

 are much more abundant than I have ever seen them. In either 

 blackberry or raspberry canes the punctures are so readily seen, 

 especially in spring, that they can be cut out while trimming and 

 the whole brood destroyed. This is indeed the best method of 

 dealing with these graceful creatures, who have little resemblance, 

 except in essential structure, to their lowly and sordid cousins of 

 the field. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE HEMIPTERA, OR BUGS. 



The term Hemiptera means half-winged, and is primarily ap- 

 plied to insects in which the wing-covers are partly thick and 

 leathery and partly thin and membraneous, the latter texture 

 obtaining towards the apex. The term becomes inapplicable, 

 however, in those insects which, agreeing otherwise in structure 

 with the half-winged species, have the anterior wings of the same 

 texture throughout, whether like that of the hind wings or de- 

 cidedly thicker. To distinguish the two series the terms Heter- 

 optera, meaning "different wing," and Homoptera, meaning 

 "equal wing," are applied. Besides these there is another 

 division which has no wings at all, and, owing to the fact that 



