41 
nor yet in the low wet grass lands. In the San Joaquin and Sacra- 
mento valleys and among the foothills bordering them on the east it 
was only upon land on which grew a certain kind of weed that I found 
the young of this locust. I submitted specimens of fliis weed to Mrs. 
Dr. Brandegee, the Botanist of the California Academy of Sciences 
and our best authority upon the plants of central and northern Cali- 
fornia, and slie identified it as the Hemitonia virgata, vulgarly known 
as "tarweed," from the sticky exudations which cover the entire 
plant. It seldom attains a greater height than 2 feet, the stem is slen- 
der, and sometimes bears several small lateral branches, the leaves are 
small, narrow, and dark green, and the greater portion of the stem is 
of a whitish, somewhat silvery color. It bears at the tips of its branches 
yellowish composite flowers, which seldom exceed half an inch in diame- 
ter j the leaves on the upper portion do not exceed a quarter of an inch 
in length. *The plant is said by Dr. Asa Gray to be either an annual or 
a biennial. 
In the eastern portion of San Joaquin and Sacramento counties and 
also in portions of Calaveras and Eldorado counties that I visited, it 
was rare to find a patch of these weeds in which the young of the Dev- 
astating Locust were not present in greater or less numbers ; at the 
same time it was extremely rare to find the young of these locusts in 
places where none of these weeds grew. I found both these weeds 
and the young locusts along the sides of the roads, and also upon un- 
plowed land about the orchards and vineyards. They were also some- 
times present in fields of volunteer or self-sown grain that had not been 
plowed for over a year, but were most abundant in the pasture lands 
among the foothills. Here they usually occurred in the narrow valleys 
or depressions lying between the hills, sometimes extending some dis- 
tance up the sides of the hills, but never high up on the sides of very 
steep hills, nor on the tops of hills, nor yet among the thick underbrush 
wherever this might occur. Among the foothills of Calaveras County, 
in the neighborhood of the town of Bur son, I found a field of these weeds 
covering 60 or 80 acres of land, and among the weeds were both adults 
and young of the Devastating Locust in large numbers. I was informed 
by a party living in the neighborhood of this field that the young locusts 
had been extremely abundant there early in the season, and that in the 
month of May he saw a large swarm of the winged locusts take flight 
and disappear to the westward ; it was reported to me that about this 
time the locusts were first observed to come into the orchards in cer- 
tain portions of San Joaquin County, lying in the same direction that 
the swarm was said to have taken; so it appears quite certain that t he 
large swarms of locusts that swept down upon the above-named county 
the present season hatched out in this and neighboring fields of tarweeds. 
I dissected a large number of the adult females of the Devastating 
Locust which I found in this field and examined the ovaries, but in 
none of them did I find any eggs in an advanced stage of development, 
