80 THE CHINCH BUG. 
would be annually destroyed by the prairie fires, thus eliminating 
whatever tendency there mighl be to perpetuate the brachypterous 
forms, and develop a fully winged more or less nomadic race which. 
as it slowly advanced inland, lost all vestige of it- brachypterous 
ancestry, i f such had existed. 
( )n the other band, we might expect the shore-inhabiting in- 
dividuals to continue in their progress along the coast, the winged in- 
dividual- continually migrating inland, leaving a mixture of the two 
forms to push forward to the east coast of Florida — where a- late as 
L906 it attacked grass on lawn- about Palm Beach— and northward 
along the Atlantic to Cape Breton. A- soon a- this migration had 
passed the southern terminus of the Allegheny Mountains the inland 
spread would, very largely at least, he restricted to the area lying be- 
tween the eastern slope of these mountain- ami the coast, thus leav- 
ing the whole area to the west to be occupied by the northward tide 
of migration instead of that from the east. East of the Mississippi 
River and south of the Ohio River the country i- more heavily tim- 
bered and the prairies are lacking, so that forest fires would here 
take the place of prairie fires; but in the Southern State- the wood- 
are composed more largely of pine, and Doctor Lugger, in Minnesota, 
found that the chinch bug did not invade the region on which only 
pine and other Coniferae grew, hut that the more southern counties 
of his State, which are more or less wooded with deciduous tree-, were 
invaded. lie also called attention to the fact that before the country 
wa- settled by the Avhites these timbered lands were burned over fre- 
quently, probably annually, but now the wooded areas are confined to 
small tract- interspersed among the farm-, and as these are not an- 
nually burned over they afford suitable -belter- for the chinch bug 
during winter, and the grain fields of the farmer afford ample food 
during the summer, while on the prairie- which are burned over such 
is not the case. 6 
Along the eastern coast the chinch bug has never been especially 
destructive to the wheat crop north of North Carolina, where, accord- 
ing t<> Doctor Fitch.'' the earliest depredation- occurred in 1783, while 
Webster d states that it threatened total destruction to the grain in 
17^r»: but since that time the ravages have not been nearly a- severe as 
farther west in the Mississippi River Valley. In 1899, 1000. 1901, 
a Prof. II. A. Morgan, then entomologist of the State Experiment Station of 
Louisiana, writing under date of May 30, 1898, states that he has never found 
the brachypterous form of chinch bug in that State, and the writer did not 
observe a single individual el' these among the many macropterous specimens 
taken by himself in that State. 
&Firs1 Annual Reporl of the Entomologist of the state Experiment Station of 
the University of Minnesota, 1895, p. 26. 
'• Second Report on Noxious. Beneficial, and other Insects of New York-, p. 278, 
i Webster on Pestilence. Vol. I. \k 279, 
