STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
753 
MIDGE. AMERICAN HISTORY. 1854. VERY DESTRUCTIVE. 
of the wasted fields were still remaining in public view, at the 
August meeting of the American Institute, Mr. Solon Robinson 
pronounced this insect to be the most terrible pest ever encoun¬ 
tered by wheat growers. In my own vicinity many of the fields 
were not harvested. As illustrating the personal losses sus¬ 
tained by our agricultural population from this scourge, I may 
here state that one of my neighbors had sowed fourteen acres to 
wheat, on lands in excellent condition for this crop. But at 
harvest time there was nothing to gather therefrom, save the 
yellow larval, of which a handful, or at least a palmful might be 
obtained on slightly rubbing any one of the ears; and after toil¬ 
ing to feed and fatten the vermin he demurred against granting 
them the additional favor of a shelter within his barn. But for 
the midge his land would have } r ielded at least fifteen bushels 
per acre, showing his loss from this pest that year to have been 
upwards of two hundred dollars, estimating wheat at its usual 
price. And this is only an ordinary case, every neighborhood 
through the country abounding in similar instances among our 
common farmers, whilst on the larger farms where fifty and a 
hundred acres or more are customarily sowed to this grain the 
individual losses have been greater in the same ratio. 
And when we attempt to reckon up the amount of damage 
sustained by the State of New York from this minute and seem¬ 
ingly powerless and insignificant insect, we almost distrust the 
evidence of statistics and figures, they present us with sums 
which appear so fabulous. The wheat crop of the State, not¬ 
withstanding the diminution it was receiving from the midge, 
amounted in 1850, according to the census of that year, to over 
thirteen millions of bushels (13,121,408). Now, if we suppose 
only one-third of this amount to have been wasted by the midge 
in 1854, estimating the wheat at $2.15 per bushel, which was its 
average value in our markets during the autumn and early win¬ 
ter of that year, it presents us with over nine million four hun¬ 
dred and three thousand dollars as tho loss sustained. But this 
amount, enormous as it appears, is but an approach to the real 
loss, as we perceive when we recur to the facts that tho crop on 
whiclvthis estimate is based was itself materially diminished by 
this insect, that a much larger crop was sowed in 1854 than in 
1849-50, and that far more than a third of the crop w r as probably 
destroyed, since many fields w r ere totally lost and others scarcely 
[Ag. Trans. J 48 
