THE CHINCH BUG. 
Few insects, and certainly no other species of the natural order to 
which it belongs, have caused such enormous pecuniary losses as has 
the chinch bug, BUssus leucoptcrus Say. Xo other insect, native to the 
Western Hemisphere, has spread its devastating hordes over a wider 
area of country with more fatal effects to the staple grains of Xorth 
America than has this one. But for the extreme susceptibility of the 
very young to destruction by drenching rains and to the less though 
not insignificant destructiveuess during rainy seasons of the parasitic 
fungus, Sporotrichium globuliferum Speg..on both the adults and young, 
the practice of raising grain year after year on the same areas, as fol- 
lowed in the United States, would be altogether unprofitable. Some 
of this insect's own habits, also emphasizing as they do the effects of 
meteorological conditions, are the most potent influences that serve to 
hold it within bounds, by giving its tendency to excessive increase a 
decidedly spasmodic character. 
DISTRIBUTION. 
The genus Blissus is widely distributed over the world, occurring in 
South Africa, Abyssinia, southern Europe, northward at least to the 
sand dunes of central and northern Hungary, and in the Western 
Hemisphere from Panama and the Island of St. Vincent northward to 
middle California on the Pacific coast and Cape Breton on the Atlantic. 
When we come to understand that the hemiptera of the world are far 
from being well known, and the faunas of South America and central 
Africa have as yet hardly been studied at all. we may well presume 
that future studies of the heniipterous insects of these countries may 
fill in some of the wide stretches of country separating the different 
areas now known to be inhabited by the several species of this genus. 
At present in the Old World it may be said to occur in the Ethiopian, 
Oriental. Sonoran. and Holarctic life /ones, while in the New World 
it ranges from the Neotropical at Panama and St. Vincent, through the 
Sonoran and past the borders of the Holarctic in British America. 
Our American species, Blissus leucopterus Say. the only one at present 
known in the Western Hemisphere, has been recorded from St. Vincent 
and Grenada, West Indies, by CThler; Cuba, by Stal; Volcan deChiriqui, 
Bngaba, and San Feliz, Panama, by Champion: San Geronimo. Paso 
Antonio. Pauzos. Chainperico. and Rio Xaranjo. Guatemala, by Cham 
pionj Lower Pnrissima, Lower California, by CThler; Alameda, CaL, 
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