454 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 
provinces, which eat the leaves from the trees. They are innu¬ 
merable in some years. In the intervals there are but few of 
them : but when they come, they strip the trees so entirely of 
their leaves, that the woods in the middle of summer are as 
naked as in winter. They eat all kinds of leaves, and very few 
trees are left untouched by them; as, about that time of the 
year the heat is most excessive. The stripping the trees of their 
leaves has this fatal consequence, that + hey cannot withstand the 
heat, but dry up entirely. In this manner, great forests are 
sometimes entirely ruined. The Swedes who live here showed 
me, here and there great tracts in the woods, where young trees 
were now growing, instead of the old ones, which, some years 
ago, had been destroyed by the caterpillars. These caterpillars 
afterwards change into moths, or phalenas .” 
If our western prairies were ever covered with wood it is most 
probably by this insect that they were first made naked, those 
trees only surviving the attack which grew upon the bottom 
lands along streams, where the drouth of mid-summer would be 
less felt than upon the uplands. 
In the year 1791, the orchards and forests of New England were 
overrun by this worm, and the leaves of the apple, oak and 
other trees were devoured by it. It was at this time that it re¬ 
ceived the name “palmer worm” by which it has since been cur¬ 
rently designated. This name was evidently derived from our 
English translation of the sacred scriptures. Another insect 
which a month or two before had devastated the fruit trees to 
an extent never previously known, appears simultaneously to 
have received the name which it still retains, the canker worm; 
for previous to this date we find this name given to what is now 
called the army worm. Many persons at that time, we doubt not, 
supposed them to be the very insects to whiSh the inspired pro¬ 
phet alluded. Two years before, a clergyman who, from some 
remarkable phenomena which had just then occurred, had formed 
the opinion that the arm of the Lord was extended in wrath over 
our land, had written a discourse, in which it was predicted that 
great calamities were soon to happen. And the advent at that 
time of one of these strange insects immediately after the other, 
in such countless numbers all over the country, ‘the palmer worm 
