STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
487 
SUPPLEMENT. 
transparent, with a dusky margin and blackish veins. Its width 
is one inch. 
215 . Johnson's Cicindela, Cicindcla Johnsonii, new species. (Ooleop- 
tera. Cicmdelidae.) 
Several specimens of a beautiful Cicindela met with in the 
buffalo trails upon the prairies west of Arkansas were sent me 
several years since by W. S. Robertson. They are 0.50 to 0.58 
long, bright green or blue, the wing covers broadly margined 
exteriorly with white, from which margin projects inwardly a 
medial tooth, the rounded anterior end of an apical lunule, and 
the nearly obsolete posterior end of a humeral lunule; mouth 
white; antenme with the four basal joints green, the fifth tawny 
yellow and the apical joints brown; beneath bright blue clothed 
on each side of the breast and abdomen with dense white hairs; 
legs green or purple, the shanks brownish yellow. I dedicate 
this species to the Hon. 13. P. Johnson, Secretary of the State 
Agricultural Society, and a prominent patron of the examination 
of our insects now in progress, whose assistance extended in 
various ways has been of much service in facilitating my 
researches. 
NOTICE OF THE GIGANTIC LOCUSTS OF TROPICAL AMERICA. 
The late Lieut. Ciiari.es M. Van Rensselaer, first officer of the ill-fated 
steamship Central America, William N. Herndon commander, which vessel 
foundered at sea September, 1857, with a loss of four hundred and twenty- 
three lives, and bullion to the value of nearly a million and a quarter dollars, 
when on the trip next preceding that sad catastrophe, gathered at Panama and 
presented to the State Agricultural Society a number of specimens of a gigantic 
grasshopper or locust which he had noticed as being common at the isthmus. 
From the terms in which Lieut. Van Rensselaer is spoken of by those who 
were well acquainted with him in Albany, the place of his nativity, I doubt 
not it can truly be said that of the many noble, gallant spirits in the naval 
service of our country, not one survives, more noble, more gallant than he. 
Public attention was strongly directed to the devastations produced by insects 
of this kind, the past season, in consequence of the accounts with which our 
newspapers abounded, of the swarms of grasshoppers which threatened to lay 
waste portions of the territory of Minnesota. And it was probably these ac¬ 
counts which prompted Lieut. V. R. to obtain these specimens, and thus show 
to our citizens that other countries contain creatures of this kind which are 
vastly more formidable than anything with which we have to contend in our 
own favored land? As the insects which are thus brought to our notice are 
the largest of the many species belonging to a group which in all ages of the 
world has stood pre-eminent for its destructiveness, it is but meet that the 
