168 DISEASES OF THE COTTON PLANT. 
origin and periodical visits of this moth. In 1843 Mr. 
Whitefnarsh B. Seabrook read a " Memoir on the Cotton- 
Plant" before the State Agricultural Society in South 
Carolina, in which he says, " That the cotton moth sur- 
vives the winter is nearly certain ; an examination of the 
neighboring woods, especially after a mild winter, has 
been often successfully made for that purpose. They 
were seen by the writer in May last, in the edge of a belt 
of pines, within a few yards of a cotton-field. In the 
winter of 1825, Benjamin Reynolds, of St. John's, Colle- 
ton, found them in the woods, principally on the cedar- 
bush, incased alive in their cover, impervious to water, 
and secured to a twig by a thread. The pupae, wrapped 
in cotton leaves, from their bleak exposure, invariably die 
on the approach of cold weather." 
From what was stated to me by some of the best 
planters in Florida last summer, it would seem that this 
caterpillar appears on their plantations more or less, 
almost, if not every year, and sometimes in a most un- 
accountable manner. Mr. E. Richards, of Cedar Keys, 
furnishes a statement which would seem to prove that it 
is migratory in its habits, as there is no other method of 
accounting for its sudden presence, except that, having 
previously existed on some other plant or weed, it had 
left it for food more congenial to its taste, although it has 
been asserted that the real caterpillar will eat nothing but 
cotton. He says : " The last of July, 1 845, these cater- 
pillars made their appearance in a small field of three or 
four acres of sea island cotton, planted on "Way Key, as 
an experiment to see if cotton could be advantageously 
cultivated on the Keys, no other cotton having been pre- 
viously planted within eighty miles of them ; but the 
whole crop was devoured. The caterpillar was at the 
