STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
525 ': 
What has been stated will serve to give the common reader 
some view of the embarrasments often encountered in this vast 
science, in arriving at the correct designation for an insect. 
Especially in this country do we experience such embarras¬ 
ments and are obliged in many instances to remain in doubt and 
uncertainty, from being unable to find in any of our public 
libraries those authorities a reference to which is indispensihle 
for obtaining the information we desire. 
The pamphlet of Mr. Say in which this insect is described is 
out of print and very scarce. Dr. Le Baron not having seen it 
suggested the name Rkyparochromus devastator as being an ap¬ 
propriate one for this insect. Although all the thighs are 
slightly thickened in this species, the anterior ones are not ob¬ 
viously more enlarged than the others, and are not sufficiently 
inflated to place it in the genus to which Dr. Le Baron assigns 
it, in which there is a striking contrast between the anterior and 
the four slender posterior thighs. In more than two dozen 
species of this genus which are now before me, this contrast is 
very plain and evident in every instance. Mr. Say therefore 
was clearly correct in referring this insect to the genus Lygseus 
and not to his genus Pamerus, which, as we have seen above, is 
synonymous with Rhyparochromus. 
This group of insects has been subdivided into quite a number 
of genera since Mr. Say’s day, and the present species now per¬ 
tains to the genus Micropus , a name meaning small footed or 
short legged, proposed by M. Spinola in his Essay upon the in¬ 
sects of this order, published in 1840, page 218. I announced 
this fact a year since in the Country Gentleman (vol. v, p. 396) 
in reply to the enquiry of E. C. Smith, asking the correct name 
of this insect. A communication appeared in the same periodi¬ 
cal soon after (vol. vi, p. 106), stating among other things, that 
the genus Micropus had not been recognized by some of the 
standard writers upon this order of insects, and that “ Herrick 
Schaffer would have placed the chinch bug, had it been known 
to him, in the genus Pachymerus” — the same genus in which, as 
we have seen above, Mr. Say long ago determined it did not be- 
l° n g! I deem it unnecessary further to notice an anonymous 
