350 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 
PEAR. TRUNK. 
I am not perfectly certain that it is caused by the insect to which 
I attribute it. The importance of the facts which I have to report 
will appear from a few preliminary remarks. 
The history of the plum weevil or curculio, so far as at preseut 
known, is briefly as follows. The beetle makes its appearance in 
May and June, cuts a crescent-shaped incision in young plums 
and other fruits, dropping an egg in the wound, the worm from 
which, boring in the fruit, causes it to fall from the tree, and the 
worm becoming full grown, buries itself in the ground, where it 
remains from three to six weeks, and having completed its trans¬ 
formations the beetle again comes abroad in July and August. 
But what becomes of it from this time until the following spring 
is not yet ascertained. Although this insect and its destructive 
habits have been so long known in this country, and every owner 
of a plum tree has year after year endured the most vexatious 
disappointments from it, we to this day remain in ignorance of 
its abode and condition during half the year. Most persons who 
have written upon it, have supposed that some of the worms were 
so late in leaving the fruit that they remained in the ground 
through the winter and from these come the beetles which appear 
in the spring; and several of the remedies which have been 
recommended for abating this evil have been based upon this 
theory. But that a whole generation of these insects should be 
brought forth abortively each summer, to perish without making 
any provision for a continuance of their species, and that their 
perpetuity should every year be left to such a mere accident as a 
few individuals casually belated in coming to maturity, w r ould be 
an anomaly 'wholly unlike anything which we meet with else¬ 
where in this department of nature’s works. And Dr. E. Sanborn 
of Andover, Mass., in several communications published in the 
Boston Cultivator and Cambridge Chronicle in 1849 and 1850, 
gives it as the result of a series of observations which he had made 
upon the larvae, that at no season of the year do they remain 
longer than six weeks in the ground, and that neither they nor 
the perfect insects lie under the ground during the winter. Dr. 
Harris hence infers, in the last edition of his Treatise, that those 
beetles which come out the latter part of summer lurk in some 
place not yet discovered, during the winter, to come abroad again 
in the spring and deposit their eggs in the fruit. 
