STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
839 
JOINT-WORM FI.Y. A DISTINCT SPECIES. 
propose for it the name by which it has been ticketed many years 
in my cabinet, Torymus Harrisii. 
The joint-worm continued its depredations upon the wheat to 
such an alarming extent, that in the year 1854, a “Joint-worm 
Convention ” composed of persons who were sufferers from it, was 
held at Warrenton, Va., for the purpose of comparing their views 
and experience and deciding upon the best modes of opposing 
this enemy. The idea of putting down an obnoxius insect by 
the same machinery and denunciatory resolutions which they 
were accustomed to bring into operation against a political 
adversary, caused at the time some merriment among our news¬ 
paper editors here at the north. I have been unable to find any 
report of the proceedings of this convention, but I see it stated 
that it resulted in recommendations of a better cultivation of 
the wheat crop, a use of guano or other fertilizers, and all other 
measures which tend to promote a rapid growth and early ripen¬ 
ing of the grain, and also after harvest burning the stubble and 
any other masses of vegetation which may be growing contiguous 
to the wheat field. 
From the occasional notices of this joint-worm which we meet 
with in the Southern Planter for a few years subsequent to this, 
it would appear that it still remained so common as to be a sub¬ 
ject of public concern. The fact of its thus continuing to be 
destructive year after year strongly indicates that the Eurytoma 
was itself the real enemy and not a parasitic destroyer of that 
enemy, since were it the latter, so numerous as it was in 1852, 
we should expect this malady in the wheat would speedily have 
ceased. 
A similar disease began to appear about this time in the barley 
crop in the central counties of the State of New York. The 
first samples of the affected straw were received at the Agricul¬ 
tural Rooms in Albany from L. Lincklaen of Cazenovia. The 
disease in this straw was identical with that of the Virginia 
wheat and the Massachusetts barley, and as the worm was found 
to be the larva of a Eurytoma, I made no doubt it would produce 
an insect of the same variety that Dr. Harris first observed. 
But on coming to examine the flies which came from this New 
York barloy, of which upwards of fifty were obtained, I was sur¬ 
prised to find the color of their legs so dissimilar as to forbid 
their being regarded as the same species. Thereupon, on notic- 
