STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
457 
however, a few specimens could be gathered trom the leaves for 
several days afterwards. 
The weather now becoming more moist, with copious showers 
repeatedly during the month of July, the trees in a measure re¬ 
covered their leaves, although the crop of fruit for the year was 
everywhere destroyed. George Christie of East Greenwich 
informed me that the trees on his farm, in good bearing years 
produce probably a thousand bushels of apples, and the pros¬ 
pects for an abundant yield were never fairer than they were 
this year, until this worm made its appearance, blighting the 
trees and causing the orchard to look as though it had been frost 
bitten. And he gathered from it this year only two or three 
bushels of fruit, of a quality so inferior that it was scarcely 
worth picking. And similar to this was the experience of the 
owners of orchards generally—young thrifty trees yielding a 
scanty supply of inferior fruit which commonly sufficed for 
family use, nothing being gathered from full grown and old 
trees. 
The following year, in June, it was universally expected that 
these worms would again appear, but the month passed away and 
no traces of them were anywhere to be seen. They could readily 
be found, however, on searching upon the leaves of the apple trees, 
but were no more common than several other kinds of worms in 
the same situation. Last year, 1855, they were quite rare, a very 
few specimens only having presented themselves to my notice. 
The present year they have been much more abundant, and in 
gardens in the city of Albany I observed a number of fruit 
trees the leaves of which had been badly eaten by them. 
At the time of the appearance of this worm in such myriads 
in 1853,1 was answering a letter from Hon. B. P. Johnson upon 
another apple tree insect, and inserted therein an account of 
this worm, with a description of it and the cocoon which it had 
then formed, stating that I would subsequently complete 
its history. I suggested that a small gay yellow moth 
which frequently occurred among apple leaves, a descrip¬ 
tion of which under the name of Jlrgyrolepia pomariana I thereto 
appended, might probably be the parent of these worms. For 
the information of my immediate neighbors and friends upon a 
lAssembly, No. 217.] 30 
