JOURNAL 
OF THE 
ROYAL AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY 
OF ENCLAXD. 
XIII. — Tlie Colorado Potato-Beetle. By Henry Walter Bates, 
F.L.S. 
[With a Plate.] 
During the past two years the agricultural world, and, to some 
extent, the general public in most countries of Western Europe, 
have been much excited by the reports of a new danger 
threatening the potato crop, in the shape, this time, of a beetle 
from America, which has spread with amazing rapidity from the 
Rocky Mountains eastward over the Northern States, attacking 
the potato fields in countless myriads, and destroying the tubers 
by stripping the plants of their leaves. The alarm was 
first started in the Far West, in Nebraska, in 1859 ; since 
then the plague has spread eastward, at the rate of about 
seventy miles per annum, until in the last and present years 
some of the States bordering the Atlantic, including Pennsyl- 
vania and New York, have seen their fields invaded by the 
devouring hosts. The excitement consequent on the phenomenon 
has been propagated chiefly by highly coloured accounts pub- 
lished in American newspapers ; and to such effect that several 
Continental Governments — Germany, Belgium, France, Russia, 
Holland, and Spain — have passed laws to prohibit or place 
under strict regulations the importation of potatoes from the 
United States. The subject, as we all know, has led to some 
Government inquiry in our own country, with the result so far 
that the opinion of the Board of Trade has been acted upon, 
and our import trade not interfered with, except that the custom- 
house officers have been instructed to see that haulm and loose 
soil brought with potatoes from America, either as ships' stores 
or for importation, are burnt and not allowed to be carried 
inland. The question has been much more discussed on the 
VOL. XI. — s. S. 2 B 
