520 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
WIREWORMS. NAME MISAPPLIED. ARE BRED FROM ELATERS. 
Alvord (Cultivator, 1864, p. 115), “I, for oue, would Avilliugly 
pay a large sum to be informed how I could rid my farm of this 
troublesome pest, for I have lost more in the injury and destruc¬ 
tion of my crops from the depredations of this worm, than from 
all other insects, birds and beasts combined, and after years of 
fruitless effort and experiment to destroy them, or to prevent their 
ravages on my crops, I have come to the conclusion that for the 
present I must bear with the loss which I annually suffer from their 
ravages, as all the different methods which I have tried to guard 
myself against them, have thus far proved of no avail.” 
Mi. Cuitis states that in Britain, overy grub and worm found by 
the farmer and gardener at the roots of their crops, including cen¬ 
tipedes and the larvae or maggots of gnats and Tipuke, have°been 
confounded together under the appellation of “the wireworm,” 
and that in so respectable a periodical as the Gardener’s Magazine, 
figures have appeared as the larva and pupa of Elater segetis , or 
the true wireworm, which were undoubtedly taken from some 
insect not belonging even to the same order. And he correctly 
remarks that such errors are sadly mischievous in a publication 
expressly intended to convey information to all classes, and no 
subsequent correction can entirely eradicate a blunder and its 
effects, when once circulated by the press. Although, in this 
country, many errors and crudities in relation to insects are being 
published, of the very many persons who have mentioned the wire- 
woim in conversing or corresponding with me, I recollect no one 
who applied this term incorrectly, and in but rare instances has 
the inquiry been made of me, whether the centipede might also be 
termed a wireworm. No such error, I think, as that complained 
of abroad, is at all prevalent here. 
These w'ireworms are the progeny of the Elater group of beetles, 
which constitute the genus to which the name Elater was given 
by Linnaeus, and which naturalists in our own day have divided 
into a number of genera which are grouped together, forming the 
family Ei.aterid.e in the order Coleopteka. These beetles are 
known to every one from their curious manner of recovering their 
upright posture when they chance to fall upon their backs. Their 
legs being too short to enable them to turn over, they have the 
faculty of giving a sudden snap or spring, whereby they bound 
upward several inches, and in falling usually alight right side up, 
