838 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
JOINT-WORM PLY. ITS PARASITE DESCRIBED, 
from the dry straw. Several incidental circumstances occur to 
my mind, some favoring and others militating against this view. 
It is scarcely worth while to consider these in detail or specu¬ 
late further upon this subject, since it is only by actual observa¬ 
tion that the real facts in the case can be ascertained. I must 
confess, however, that now, when I come to cast over all the 
evidence which we have in relation to this subject, I feel less 
confident than I have boen for a few years past, that this Eury- 
toma is the real parent of the joint-worm. 
It was in the jrnar 1853 that the concluding portion of the 
second edition of Dr. Harris’s Treatise on Injurious Insects 
passed through the press, giving the most full and exact account 
of the joint-worm that has hitherto appeared. He regards the 
fly which we obtained from the diseased straw as being a mere 
variety of the barley fly which he had previously described, this 
wheat fly differing in no respect from that except in the color of 
the shanks of the fore legs, these being pale yellow instead of 
black. And he regards this fly as being in all probability the real 
cause of the disease in the wheat and barley, and not a parasite 
as he had supposed it to be in the first edition of his treatise. 
In connection with the Eurytoma Hordei, Dr. Harris gives an 
account of the insect which appears to be its most common 
parasitic destroyer, specimens of which we had obtained from 
the same parcels of wheat from which the Eurytoma came. 
There is every reason to believe that this parasite descends from 
the active white worm clothed with a few scattering hairs, which 
Prof. Cabell occasionally found as already stated, sometimes in 
the same cell with a dead and partly consumed Eurytoma larva, 
and sometimes alone in the cell, it being perceptibly larger in the 
latter case than in the former. Two individuals of this fly which 
I obtained did not come from the straw until some days after the 
hatch of the Eurytoma flies had ended. They are 0.10 long, 
black, with pale yellow legs having the thighs black and the 
anterior and hind shanks more or less smoky, the claws at the 
end of the feet being black. The fore wings usually have a 
smoky cloud or spot in their middle. The basal joint of the 
antennae is black in the male and pale or whitish in the female. 
It pertains to the same family Chalcididje to which the Eurytoma 
belongs, and Dr. Harris refers it to the genus Torymus, but no 
specific name for it accompanies his description. I therefore 
