816 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
HIDQK. PARASITES. HAVE WE ANY IN AMERICA ? 
any previous period. Why is it so severe and unremitting a pest 
in our country when it is so slight and transitory in its native 
land ? There must be a cause for this remarkable difference. 
What can that cause be? I can impute it to only one thing. 
We here are destitute of nature’s appointed means for repressing 
and subduing this insect. Those other insects which have been 
created tor the purpose of quelling this species and keeping it 
restrained within its appropriate sphere have never yet reached 
our shores. We have received the evil without the remedy. 
And thus the midge is able to multiply and flourish, to revel and 
riot, year after year, without let or hindrance. This certainly 
would seem to be the principal if not the sole cause why the 
career of this insect here is so very different from what it is in 
the old world. If we have any insect in this country which 
lives upon and destroys the midge, with the abundance of food 
which has been furnished it, why has not that insect increased 
and produced some mitigation of this evil ? 
But it has repeatedly been reported that we have insects in 
this country which are parasitic destroyers of the wheat midge. 
1 have myself heretofore supposed that we had such insects; and 
it was only when 1 perceived how utterly they failed to fulfil 
their mission that I began to distrust the correctness of this 
opinion. 
In the early part of my researches I noticed an insect under 
such circumstances as led me to confidently regard it as a 
destroyer of the midge. I saw it was a member of the Chalci- 
dian family, and supposing I should have no difficulty in always 
finding the same insect in the same situation, I neglected to pre¬ 
serve specimens of it, and thus am unable now to ascertain with 
certainty the species which I then observed. A few years after¬ 
wards, when the midge larvaj were crawling down upon the 
straw, I again noticed a parasitic insect examining these larvae 
with its antennae, and the larva with a skip throwing itself from 
the straw to escape from it. I captured and saved two speci¬ 
mens of this jjarasite, feeling confident I should meet with it 
multiplied and much more numerous the following year, whereby 
I could then investigate it to better advantage. But the next 
year I was unable to meet with it; and within the past few years 
I have strenuously endeavored to find this insect at the same 
operation again, but without success. And now, on hunting out 
