800 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
MIDGE. COCOONS. NAKED LARYjE FOUND IN SPRING. 
that although sunk thus in water they were alive at the end of 
fifty days. Satisfied with the experiment the vial was set aside, 
and four months afterwards, happening to look at it, both worms 
were then found to be dead and semiputrid. 
The Cocoons and Pupa. 
Wo next come to trace the history of these insects onward, so 
far as our present knowledge enables us to do this, after they 
enter the ground. 
It is now sixteen years since I took my first step in investiga¬ 
ting the wheat midge. That step was as follows: Early in 
March, 1845, soon after the snows of winter had melted away, I 
examined the earth in a field where wheat had been grown the 
summer before, which had been considerably infested by the 
midge ; and I found slightly under the surface and under frag¬ 
ments of dead straws and leaves lying on the surface, a few 
bright yellow larvm, identical in their appearance with those 
which are seen in the heads of wheat. I hence inferred with 
confidence that the larvse laid naked, dormant and inactive, 
slightly within the ground, during the autumn and winter, 
changing probably to pupae only a few weeks before they give 
out the flies in June. 
The larvae which I found were placed in moist earth in a vial, 
and other engagements drawing off my attention, ere I was aware 
of it this earth had become so dried that I doubted not the 
worms therein were dead, and no further attention therefore was 
given to them. The following June, however, when I discovered 
the flies of the midge in our wheat fields, on looking at this vial 
I found there were in it two or three dead flies of the same kind. 
The pupae cases from which these flies had come were also there; 
but on a most careful examination of the dry earth in the vial I 
could detect no vestiges of larva skins. I therefore concluded 
that the larva which I placed in the vial must have taken on the 
pupa form without casting off their skins, the same that the 
Willow gall midge has the strongest indications of doing also. 
And this opinion acquiring additional strength from further 
observations, I fully expressed in an article on the wheat midge, 
published January 26th, 1856, In the Rural New Yorker, vol. vii, 
p. 29. From galls containing the larva of the Willow midge 
which I transmitted to the late Dr. T. W. Harris, he also became 
