79 



considerable damage by detaching and causing the roots to dry, 

 though these effects are usually attributed by farmers to very dif- 

 ferent causes." 



AVhile the observations recorded iu the present paper were in 

 progress, I published in the "Prairie Farmer" of Chicago, for May 

 14, 1887, a brief illustrated notice of the occurrence of these in- 

 sects in the meadows and pastures of Southern Illinois, connect- 

 ing them with a serious destruction of the roots of grass and 

 clover and a consequent deadening of considerable patches in 

 meadows and pastures. In this article was given also a brief 

 summary of the results of feeding experiments. 



In a letter received from Dr. Eiley, of the U. S. Department 

 of Agriculture, June 24, 1887, I am informed that one species did 

 great injury in California, in 1874, to growing grass, alfalfa, and 

 clover. "They seemed," he says, "to show a preference for open 

 soil, and cut off the plants about three fourths of an inch from 

 the surface, working in colonies and occupying areas from one 

 eighth of an acre to five acres." The species here complained of 

 he thinks identical with T. iephrocepliala, which is very common 

 all over the Eastern United States and is not unfrequently found 

 very thick in grass lands. The injury in California was briefly 

 referred to by Dr. liiley in the "New York Weekly Tribune" for 

 Ax^ril 8, 1874. In the same letter T. bicornis is mentioned as 

 received from Indiana in 1884, where, however, it was not known 

 to be especially injurious. In England, and on the Continent, 

 some species are very widely known to farmers and gardeners as 

 destructive enemies of forage plants, small grain, turnips, cab- 

 bages, and the like, and are treated in every general work on 

 farm and garden insects. Our American species have apparently 

 diff'erent average feeding habits, and depend, it is to be presumed, 

 much more exclusively on dead and decaying vegetation than do 

 the more abundant of their European allies. I am not aware, 

 however, that precise experiments have hitherto been made to 

 learn the choice of food made by our common leather- jackets, or 

 meadow maggots (as they have lately been called in Illinois); and 

 it is possible that they do more general and considerable injury 

 than has been suspected. 



Concerning a single species, the commonest here in 1886 and 

 1887, I have recently collected information which shows it to be 

 capable of at least intensifying the damage done by drouth to 

 meadows of clover, blue grass, and timothy. A very general and 

 serious injury to grass and clover lands in many parts of 

 Southern and Central Illinois —severest and most general to the 

 southward — was frequently associated in those years with great 

 numbers of large, dirty gray, footless maggots — the larvae of this 

 insect - found among the roots, where the latter had been so eaten 

 away that the plants were killed and loosened from the ground, 

 often in patches of considerable size. Specimens collected here 

 <;ontained in their stomachs a mixture of dead and living vegeta- 

 tion,— roots and leaves of grass, — as did others placed in sod and 

 kept under observation in breeding cages. 



