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running to extremes in either direction or arraying one class of in¬ 
dustry against another, for this is inimical to the general welfare, and 
retards progress in enlightenment, but to so modify and proportion 
them as to produce the most beneficial results. If, a plan could be 
devised by which owners of large farms could cut them up and divide 
them among tenants, in parts no larger than the labor of each tenant 
could properly cultivate, the result would be far more beneficial to the 
masses, and the destruction by insects would be far less than the 
present method of working these large farms by machinery. This 
would have a tendency, which is largely growing upon us, and bring¬ 
ing with it a train of evils, to gravitate the laboring populations to 
the cities. But the question which governs in this matter is, will it 
pay? and so long as it is answered in the negative, so long will the 
present tendency continue. As the warfare with insects must there¬ 
fore go on as it has done, only growing fiercer and fiercer with each 
returning season, we must, as our duty requires, court nature in order 
to persuade her to yield up her secrets that we may be enabled to 
devise new means of destroying the hosts of lilliputian foes that are 
constantly swelling their ranks by the addition of fresh cohorts. 
I do not deem it necessary at present, as heretofore intimated, to 
enter upon a full description of the various means which may be em¬ 
ployed to destroy locusts. If they should greatly increase, or the mi¬ 
gratory species break over the bounds nature has hitherto fixed to its 
migrations, it will then become necessary for our farmers to be fully 
posted in reference to the best means of defense. 
Is it likely that the Rocky Mountain locust will ever invade Illinois , 
to an injurious extent? 
A thorough and elaborate discussion of this question would require 
more space and time than is at this time at my command; nor is it 
necessary to enter upon so complete an investigation, until some rea¬ 
son appears to render doubtful the conclusion arrived at: that it will 
not. 
Mr. Walsh, our former able entomologist, was the first to reach this 
conclusion, and subsequent facts and experience have tended strongly 
to confirm it; but at the same time these facts have demonstrated 
that the reasons on which he based this conclusion were erroneons. 
His idea was that the reason they did not and could not invade 
Illinois was, that the limits reached by them in their eastern flight— 
about or a little east of the middle of Iowa—marked the extent of 
their powers of flight. “It would be absurd, for example,” he argues, 
“to imagine for one instant that a grasshopper army, starting from 
the Rocky Mountains, could in one season fly all the way to France 
or England, or even as far as the Atlantic seaboard of the United 
States.” . He appears to have entertained that these armies came from 
that part of the Rocky Mountain range immediately west of us, and 
came in a more or less direct east course. He estimates the greatest 
extent of their migrations at about 550 miles, and supposes it impos¬ 
sible for them to extend them to 700 miles. Abundant evidence ac¬ 
quired since that time shows that the general course of the invading 
swarms is southeast, and that the area from which those come that 
invade Iowa and Nebraska, lies in the northwest, chiefly in Montana 
and British America; not within, but east of the Rocky Mountain 
range,—the mountain range is also a source of supply. But I now 
