STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
671 
garden flea, its food, and combats, how it injures the leaves. 
and cabbages are principally destroyed, whilst in the seed-leaf, by some 
Si/mnthurus, the size of a pin’s head, and nearly globular. It hops with great 
facility by means of its forked tail, and may be found on every square inch 
of all old cultivated ground, but it is not plentiful on new land.” 
These Garden Fleas are so minute that the human eye without the aid of 
glasses is wholly unable to inspect their movements. The following observa¬ 
tions will therefore be the more interesting to the reader. It is some years 
since, that I noticed several of these insects on a piece of new pine board 
lying in the garden. Wondering what they could find to attract them to that 
situation, where I thought the odor of any turpentine in the wood would 
rather make it repulsive to them, I was able to observe their operations by 
approaching a magnifying glass to them gently, so as not to alarm them and 
cause them to skip away—the. light colored surface of the new wood enabling 
me to inspect their movements much more accurately than could be done were 
they standing upon a darker colored ground. Several of them were noticed, 
here and there, to have, grasped in their mouths, what, appeared to be an 
exceedingly minute flexible fiber of the wood, fine as a fragment of a spider's 
web; and they were pulling backward, at the same time shaking their heads 
slightly, evidently to tear off these fibers. One of the fore legs was 
frequently used to crowd this fiber more and more into the mouth, whenever 
it became peeled up and too long to pull upon to advantage. Everything 
indicated that it was for the purpose of food that they were thus tearing off 
this fine fuzz from the surface of the new board. At one place was a small 
black spot in the board, caused apparently by some old disease in the wood 
at this point, which rendered it more soft and palatable to the insects, for two 
of them were here busily occupied in gnawing the particles of matter from the 
surface, as it seemed. And this brought them so close together that one of 
them happened to jostle against the other. This indignity was promptly 
resented by the flea which was thus intruded upon, who resolutely put his 
forehead against that of his comrade and pushed him back, in a similar man¬ 
ner to two cows fighting. A combat hereupon took place between them, each 
endeavoring to bite the head or legs of the other. This fighting lasted only a 
moment or two, however, and then both quietly returned to the discolored spot 
and again commenced gnawing the friable matter there. Ere long the same 
mishap again occurred and the same combat was again repeated and their 
differences adjusted as speedily as before. 
Our gardeners universally regard these fleas as being injurious, but not so 
everely injurious as the larger sized flea-beetles (Ilaltica) with which they 
are almost always associated. And this appears to be a correct estimate of 
their character. I have sought to ascertain the exact nature of the injury 
which they do, and from the best observations which I have yet been able to 
make I think these fleas never perforate holes in the leaves or gnaw their 
texture where it is green and in a healthy, growing state. Their small jaws 
arc probably too soft and weak to enable them to break down and masticate 
the substance of the leaf. But when a flea-beetle perforates a hole in a leaf, 
these garden fleas afterwards gather around the perforation to feed upon the 
soft matter which is there formed by the evaporation of the exuding juice. 
