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ADDRESS 
OP ASA PITCH M. D., ENTOMOLOGIST OP THE SOCIETY, 
ON THE CURCULIO AND BLACK KNOT ON PLUM TREES. 
Mr. President and Gentlemen : 
The Curculio or Plum weevil and the Black knot excrescences on plum 
and cherry trees having been prominent in my investigations since I last 
addressed you, I have thought these would be as interesting as any subjects 
I can select, on which to speak at this time. I am the more induced to 
make the Curculio a prominent topic of the present lecture, since no par¬ 
ticular account of this important insect has yet been given in my Reports 
on Noxious Insects, and may not appear for a while to come, for the reason 
that I aim to introduce nothing in those Reports which has not been 
authentically ascertained by actual observation, and an important portion 
of the yearly life of this insect is yet remaining undiscovered and a subject 
of speculation and conjecture, 
I am inclined to rank the Curculio or Plum weevil as the most important 
and worst injurious insect which we have in our country. Although the 
Wheat midge is at the present period causing a much greater amount of 
pecuniary loss than this insect, I cannot but think that its career will be 
analagous to that of its predecessor, the Hessian fly, and that it will there¬ 
fore in time become so fully naturalized and mastered by its parasitic 
destroyers, that it will cease to be the formidable evil which it now is. 
Unlike the Wheat midge, the Curculio is a native insect of our country, 
which has now been known upwards of a century, during all of which time 
it appears to have gradually multiplied and increased its forces, without 
any cessation or intervals in its ravages. At first, in the correspondence 
between the botanists Collinson and Bartram, in the year 1746, it is spoken 
of as totally destroying the nectarines in and around the city of Philadel¬ 
phia, whilst the plums it is said, were but slightly molested by it. But 
after a time, it took the plums also. As an evidence of its steady progress 
and increase during the past forty years, I may state the fact, that in my 
boyhood, the wild plum trees in my own vicinity were often well filled with 
fruit. But though thrifty trees are still growing in several of the same 
places, I have never since that time seen a ripened plum upon any of them. 
And now it has become so multiplied that the plum no longer suffices to 
accommodate it, and it therefore attacks our cherries and apples also, and 
a large portion of these are every year blighted and destroyed by it. 
As already intimated, this insect and its habit of destroying young plums, 
has been known in our country, for more than a century. And so formi¬ 
dable an evil is it, that communications without number, in relation to it 
