746 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
MIDGE. 
soil throughout the Northern States of the American Union and 
the adjoining British Provinces will with one consent respond to 
the truth of this maxim. 
It is now sixteen years ago, that, being solicited by an 
esteemed friend to contribute to a scientific journal which he was 
publishing, I furnished an Essay on this insect, which was also 
inserted in the Transactions of this Society for the year 1845. 
It was my first effort at authorship in this science, undertaken 
after the observations of but one season. It was necessarily an 
imperfect production, and I have for a long time intended to 
write the history of this important insect anew, that I might 
prebent it in a more correct and complete manner than was done 
in this early performance. I now come to execute this design ; 
and I propose first to give a summary view of the history of this 
insect and its depredations abroad and in our own country, and 
then to present a description of the insect and an account of its 
habits and transformations, so far as they have at this date 
become known to me. 
Its Foreign History. 
The first notice which we find of the Wheat midge, carries us 
back to those days of ignorance when every remarkable pheno¬ 
menon in the natural world was superstitiously regarded as an 
omen of some impending calamity. In the winter of 1740 the 
cold was so intense from Christmas till the middle of February, 
that the Thames was frozen over at London so solidly, that a 
fair was held on the ice of that river. We are told in Ellis’ 
Modern Husbandman, that, “ After this, we had a melancholy 
sight, for as soon as the wheat had done blooming, vast numbers 
of black flies attacked the wheat ears, and blowed a little yellow 
maggot which ate up some of the kernels, in others part of them, 
and which caused multitudes of ears to miss of their fulness, 
acting in some measure like a sort of locust, till rain fell and 
washed them off; and though this evil lias happened in other 
summers to the wheat in some degree, and not done much harm, 
yet if the good providence of God had not hindored it, they 
might have ruined all the crops of wheat in the nation.’ 
(Hind’s Essay, page 76.) The knowledge which we now possess 
of this insect, renders the crude ideas respecting it which we 
meet with in this extract, doubly interesting. The “ black flies ” 
