770 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
RIDfl*. TLT. BXAUINBD tH FBABCB BY M. AllYOT. 
pronounced on a subject of this kind upon grounds more clear 
and strong than I think I possessed in this case. 
This same subject was at that time in much the same posture 
in France that it was in this country. M. Herpin in his interest¬ 
ing Memoir on divers noxious insects, published in the Memoirs 
of the Royal and Central Society of Agriculture for the year 
1842, gave a short account (page 366) of some little yellow larvae 
which he found near Paris in the ears of wheat at the time of 
their flowering, and which appeared to him to be closely analo¬ 
gous to those of Mr. Kirby’s C. Tritici. It thus became known 
that an insect similar to the wheat midge existed in the wheat of 
France, but whether it actually was that species remained in 
doubt, until one of the Paris entomologists, with whose published 
works I have for many years been familiarly acquainted, and have 
thereby come to esteem him as one of the most eminent of my 
cotemporaries in this science, M. C. J. B. Amyot, sought to deter¬ 
mine what insect this was. In 1850, going to the locality men¬ 
tioned by M. Herpin, he discovered the same larvae in the wheat 
ears, and says of them, their perfect resemblance to that which 
M. Asa Fitch has figured (alluding to fig. 11 on plate ii) does not 
permit me to doubt their being the same species which has caused 
so great damages in America and England, or at least a species 
very near it and having the same destructive habits. The follow¬ 
ing year M. Amyot received from M. Herpin upwards of twenty 
specimens of the perfect insect, which had been gathered five 
years before and preserved in a vial of alcohol. Now, on most 
carefully scrutinizing these specimens and comparing them with 
Mr. Curtis’s figure of the British and mine of the American 
insect, he noticed in my figures a short transverse veinlet repre¬ 
sented as connecting the middle vein of the wings with the outer 
vein. This veinlet is not represented in Mr. Curtis’s figure, nor 
could M. Amyot detect it as occurring, in any of the specimens 
before him. He hence came to the conclusion that the French 
insect was identical with the English and was the true Cecido- 
myia Tritici of Mr. Kirby, and that I was in error in pronouncing 
Our American insect to be the same species. A full statement of 
this examination and its results he communicated to the Entomo¬ 
logical Society of France, accompanied with an extended sum¬ 
mary of the contents of my Essay, which was published in the 
Bulletins of the Society for the year 1851, pages lvi-lxii. 
