750 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
MIDGE. PROBABLY BROUGHT FIRST TO QUEBEC. APPEARS IN VERMONT. 
returned to this inquiry in all except two instances. John John¬ 
ston states that a number of years ago, perhaps about thirty, the 
heads of wheat were injured, resembling the heads injured by 
midge, but it was not midge, but a small white worm, which did 
considerable damage. The following year we still had a few, but 
since I have never seen them. (Transactions, 1848, p. 295.) 
Joseph Watson states that in Schoharie county about the year 
1835—’G, a worm a quarter of an inch long, white with a brown 
head, appeared in the wheat heads, and roughed them, or the 
birds did it in catching the worms, but they have not appeared 
since. (Trans. 1848, p. 301.) 
As this insect first attracted notice on this continent in the 
northwestern part of Vermont bordering on Canada, it has here¬ 
tofore been a mystery to me how it could have become introdu¬ 
ced so far into the interior of the country, some two hundred 
miles from the sea-coast, and fifty miles from Montreal, the nearest 
inland port open to the sea. A statement which we meet with 
in a letter from Hon. Janies S. Wadsworth, throws important 
light on this subject. He says that Mr. Coverdale, a neighbor of 
his, an Englishman by birth, resided in the year 1828 upon the 
St. Lawrence, forty miles above Quebec, and met with the wheat 
midge there, recognizing it as the same insect he had previously 
seen in England. (Transactions, 1858, p. 300.) Hence there is 
every probability that this insect was originally brought from 
Great Britain to Quebec, when lying in its larva state in some 
unthreshed wheat; and that it extended itself from thence along 
the St. Lawrence and Chambly (Sorelle) rivers, and thus reached 
Vermont—the inhabitants along those rivers being so little intel¬ 
ligent and the wheat crop there so scanty and uncertain, that 
any injury which the insect occasioned failed to excite public 
attention. 
A letter in the New England Farmer, (vol. xix, p. 301) from 
Solomon W. Jewett of Weybridge, Vt., one of the most distin¬ 
guished farmers in his state at that period and a frequent contri¬ 
butor to our agricultural periodicals, forms our earliest record of 
the appearance of the wheat midge upon this continent. He 
states that it was first seen in northwestern Vermont in the year 
1820, though it was not until 1828 and ’29 that it became so 
numerous and destructive as to attract public attention. And 
all the other early accounts concur in representing it as having 
overspread the surrounding country from that point. 
