688 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 
tors upon the trees of this order, will be found noticed in the 
following pages. But as these insects have been much less in¬ 
vestigated than those which infest fruit trees, it is impossible in 
many instances to give an explicit statement of their habits and 
the appearance of their larvas. To facilitate references from 
one species to another, the numbering of them is continued on¬ 
ward from the last Report in one continuous series. 
The evergreens are so highly esteemed for ornamental pur¬ 
poses, and some of them, particularly the pines, are so valuable 
on account of the timber they yield us, that we are much inte¬ 
rested in knowing the insects which wo have in our country, 
which infest these trees to their injury, eithei' by stinting their 
growth, marring and deforming them, or causing their prema¬ 
ture decay and death. Fortunately for us, it is upon trees that 
are sickly and decaying or upon their dead trunks and timber 
that most of these insects make their attack. Such insects are 
currently regarded as being of but little importance, those only 
which are the source of the evil, which prey upon trees that aro 
healthy and in full vigor, causing them to become sickly and 
decrepit, being deemed of a character so pernicious as to merit 
special observation. And yet those insects which only invade 
dead trees and their timber are at times occasioning serious 
losses, showing they are very far from being such trivial evils 
as we are accustomed to deem them. Whilst this Report is in 
the course of preparation a casuality occurs in our midst which 
furnishes a forcible illustration of the truth of this statement. 
I allude to the breaking of the railroad bridge over the Sau- 
quoit creek near Utica, on the morning of May 11th, by which 
frightful disaster eight persons lost their lives and upwards of 
fifty others were maimed and injured more or less severely. 
We are informed by the Utica Morning Herald, in an article 
prepared immediately after the writer had visited and examin¬ 
ed the scene of this catastrophe, that the principal timbers of 
this bridge, though externally perfectly sound in their appear¬ 
ance, were profusely perforated with minute worm holes, whilst 
all the interior was so decayed and rotten that the slightest 
force sufficed to break it into fragments. This fully explains 
to us why a structure which had been so recently erected that 
no suspicions could reasonably be entertained of its being in the 
