41 
and under the skin of the fruit by the mother beetles, and so soon as 
deposited she cuts around and under the egg, leaving a crescent or new- 
moon shaped mark on the fruit, with a round dot (hole where the egg 
was laid) between the two horns of the crescent. In the Garden Plums, 
Nectarines, Peaches, Apricots, late Cherries, &c., these eggs soon hatch 
and bring forth white, footless grubs, which burrow through the pulp 
of the fruit and live and grow fat on its substance, and at the time 
when the fruit should mature, instead of a fine, delicious fruit, one finds, 
though perhaps quite fair without, a mass of rottenness within, with a 
nasty grub wallowing around in its own excrement, and the rotten pulp 
of the fruit, thereby completely destroying it for any purpose whatever 
as a fruit. 
That the numbers of this pest have grown less each year for the past 
ten years, and more especially during the last three years, is the evi- 
dence of all careful observers. This grand result has evidently been 
brought about by the continuously-increasing numbers of its natural 
enemies, in the form of other insects, &c., and if this rate of decrease 
and increase keeps on, we may in the near future be so relieved of this 
pest as to be able to have fair crops of the stone fruits without using 
preventive measures. 
So much about the Plum Ourculio is necessary for the general reader 
in understanding this paper, and it is well to continually bear in mind 
that, until a very recent date, the native plums were considered as one 
of the fruits totally destroyed by the Plum Ourculio by all , unless it 
was u Ourculio proof” or protected from the parent beetle. But this be- 
lief was not and is not true, for we shall find as we proceed that all, or 
nearly all, of the native plums are practically curculio proof. And 
what is of very much more value, we will find that instead of breeding 
and multiplying the Plum Ourculio, they scarcely breed them at all, 
and that if these plums are planted in sufficient quantity they will 
greatly reduce its numbers and protect other fruit from its ravages. 
Then, of course, when we found nearly every fallen fruit marked with 
the peculiar marks made by the Ourculio when laying her eggs, we all 
of us, professors of entomology, professors of horticulture, fruit-growers, 
and u clod-hoppers” at once jumped to the conclusion that the u Little 
Turk” (so called from her ovipositing mark being crescent-shaped) was 
the cause of the loss of our plums. We all believed this to be true ; we 
looked for no other explanation ; we had no data on which to base a 
search for any other explanation, so we sheathed our weapons and re- 
treated from the field vanquished. 
in the mean time what few matured plum thickets were left, the few 
that had escaped the farmer’s grubbing hoe, continued to give annually 
bountiful crops of fruit, the Curculio to the contrary notwithstanding, 
and, whether stung or not by that insect, matured and ripened their 
fruit. 
It is true that the treer in these wild plum patches were not as vig- 
