768 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
MIDGK. FLY. WINaa DESCRIBED. THE BALE, 
only ono of these veins is seen in the same incidence of the light, for as the wing is gradually 
turned to bring the other vein into view it causes the first to vanish. 
The bale (Plate ii, fig. 4), has so successfully eluded the search of collectors that it has 
only been discovered in a few instances. Mr. Kirby was unable to find this sex, and Mr. 
Curtis states he has never seen it. The first season of my observations, ns an occasional 
individual of this sex which I discovered among the hosts of females in a wheat field oorres- 
sponded with one bred in a vial from larva; disinterred from among the stubble in an old 
wheat field in March, I was assured that these were the true males of this species, notwith¬ 
standing they differed so greatly from the females in their antenna; and the form of their 
bodies. The antenna; in this sex are remarkably long, slender and delicate. They are 
double the length of the body, aod are oomposod of twenty-four joints of a very oxact globu¬ 
lar form (Plate ii, fig. 6), resembling a row of beads parted from each other on a string, each 
joint being separated widely from its fellows, the pedicel or thread between being about twice 
the length of the joint itself. A single row of hairs surrounds each joint, in a whirl. The 
abdomen, instead of being oval or egg-shaped and narrowed at its base as it is in the female, 
's hero broadest at the base, and thence tapers gradually, though slightly, towards the apex. 
Its last joint, however, is broader than the one or two preceding it, and is kidney-shaped or 
convex in front and concave behind. The male is also smaller in size than the femalo. In 
all other respects, such as color, the veins of its wings, Ac., it corresponds with that sex. 
Now that I have come to speak of the wings of the wheat midge 
and their veins, or nerves as they are often but I think less cor¬ 
rectly termed, it is necessary that I should recur to a topic of 
considerable interest which has arisen from some of the repre¬ 
sentations of these parts which were made in my first essay on 
this insect. 
When that essay was prepared, this new and terrible enemy of 
our wheat crops had been prominent in public notice some 
twenty-five years. Much diversity of opinion existed with res¬ 
pect to it; and what was its real name and nature, whether it 
was an animalcule, a worm, or the larva of an insect, was a sub¬ 
ject of much discussion and earnest enquiry, no one in the whole 
country feeling himself competent to investigate and decide this 
mooted topic. I, locally known as a collector of insects, was re¬ 
peatedly applied to for an opinion, which, being only acquainted 
with insects in their perfect form, I was unable to give. It was 
first suggested that it was the English Cecidomyia Tritici by the 
late Judge Buel, who, in a report on this enemy, presented to the 
State Agricultural Convention at Albany, February 1st, 1838, 
stated it as his belief that it was that insect, and cited the short 
notices contained in Kirby and Spence’s Entomology and Low’s 
Elements of Practical Agriculture as the ground of his belief 
(Cultivator, vol. v, p. 27). And three years afterwards, Dr. Har¬ 
ris, in the first edition of his Treatise, p. 439, gave our insect as 
“resembling in its destructive habits” the C. Tritici. 
This is briefly the posture in which this matter 6tood, when, as 
