STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
453 
A pale yellowish green worm having a dusky or blackish stripe along 
each side of the back with a narrower whitish stripe on its upper side 
and a dusky line in the middle, and a shining yellow head, the hue 
of beeswax; residing in worm-eaten leaves drawn together by silken 
threads, and when jarred, dropping and hanging in the air suspended 
by threads; appearing the latter part of June, at times excessively 
numerous. 
The Palmer-worm, Chxtocliilus pometellus, Harris, (Plate 4, fig. 4.) 
Though not abundant, this worm is common upon the leaves 
of orchards and forests, making its appearance every year about 
the middle of June and continuing till the last of the month. 
But it sometimes becomes multiplied in a most astonishing man¬ 
ner, appearing suddenly in prodigious numbers over a vast ex¬ 
tent of country, in a single day changing the green foliage every¬ 
where to a withered browy hue, as though it had been scorched 
by fire. And after continuing a week or two it disappears as 
suddenly as it came, so that on a tree which to-day contains 
hundreds of these worms, to-morrow not one can be found. 
And the following year when the same season comes round and 
we are looking for multitudes of these insects to make their 
appearance again, no traces of them are to be seen. 
As this worm comes forth nearly a month later in the year 
than the apple tree caterpillar spoken of in the foregoing pages, 
it is much more destructive to the trees. When their foliage is 
stripped off and destroyed by this worm, only a slight crop of 
leaves puts out upon them after it disappears. Old trees 
and many of the limbs upon young thrifty trees die; and 
after a visitation of these worms, should the weather during 
the month of July prove to be dry, and hot, as it frequently is, 
the damage is much more extensive, whole orchards and forests 
perishing. 
At a former period when the surface of our country was 
covered with one continuous forest it must have been a singular 
and sad spectacle to see the timber over such vast districts all 
blighted and leafless, as it doubtless was at times, from having 
been overrun by these worms. It is most probably these insects 
to which the Sweedish naturalist, Kalm, in his travels through 
this country a century ago, alludes in the following passage, 
(vol. ii, p. 7 .) <t There is likewise a kind of caterpillars in these 
