812 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
CUT-WORMS. THEIR PUPA STATE. STRIPED CUT-WORM DESCRIBED. 
sufficiently to hide itself from view. It is also much more irritable, more 
ferocious and combative. If two of them are inclosed in a box together, 
and one crowds against or attempts to crawl over-the other, it spitefully 
resents this freedom and snappishly tries to bite the intruder. 
These Yellow-headed worms continued to cut off the corn for more than 
a week after the others had disappeared, remaining out till about the close 
of the first week in July. 
When the Cut-worm is done feeding it crawls down into the earth to the 
depth of three or four inches, where it is' not liable to be disturbed by any 
other worms inhabiting the superficial soil. It here doubles itself together 
in the shape of a horse-shoe, and by turning around and around in the 
same spot, presses the soil outward from around it, compacting it into a 
thin brittle kind of shell which the wet from any showers of rain 
will not penetrate, forming a large oval cavity with a smooth sur¬ 
face on its inside. In this cavity the worm lies motionless and be¬ 
comes contracted in size and of a stiff and more firm consistency. The 
forward part of its body becomes swollen, more and more, till at 
length the skin bursts open upon the back and the hard shining yellow 
shell of the pupa begins to protrude from this opening. By slight sudden 
starts or shrugs, the skin is gradually thrown off and remains in a shrivel¬ 
led mass at the end of the insect, which is now in its pupa form, without 
any mouth or feet, its shape being that of an elongated-egg of a shining 
chestnut yellow color, thrice as long as thick, but only half as long as was 
the full grown worm. This pupa or chrysalis lies quiet and motionless in 
its oval cell under the ground for about four weeks, when its outer shell¬ 
like covering cracks open upon the fore part of the back, and the moth or 
perfect insect crowds itself out from it, and upward through the loose earth 
to the surface. The first moth from the Striped Out-worm presented itself 
to us this year on the evening of the sixth of July, and upon the evening 
of the tenth the same moths had become exceedingly numerous. The 
worms had been so diversified in the depth of their color and the distinct¬ 
ness of their stripes, that I had confidently expected to see a similar diver¬ 
sity in the moths which they produced. I was, therefore, greatly surprised 
to find the latter remarkably uniform, no differences occurring to my obser¬ 
vation this season that were susceptible of being described as varieties. 
Now that we have ascertained the moth of this, one of our most common 
Cut-worms, it is important that we give the most accurate description of 
it and of the worm from which it comes, that we are able to draw up from 
the numerous specimens we have examined, and thus place this species on 
record so distinctly that it may ever hereafter be readily recognized. 
The Striped Cut-worm, as we have heretofore termed it, is a cylindrical 
worm, usually about an inch in length when disinterred beside the severed 
plants in our gardens and corn fields, and upwards of an inch and a quar¬ 
ter when it is fully grown. Its ground color is dirty white or ash gray, 
occasionally slightly tinged with yellowish; the top of its neck shining 
black, with three white or pale longitudinal stripes; a whitish line along 
the middle of its back between two dark ones; on each side three dark stripes 
