113 
been found with division line of joint between. The change takes 
place in early morning orevening, although I have seen them out of 
their retreat during cloudy days. The larva changes perceptibly 
during its growth ; at first it is of a livid hue, with light stripes 
along the body, which become broader as it increases in size, the color 
becoming lighter, also. The full-grown larva is so unlike the young, 
that, unless aware of the change undergone, it would not be recog¬ 
nized as the same. 
The larva becomes fully grown about the last of August with us, 
and then changes to the chrysalis. It has been understood, that the 
larva leaves the stalk and bores into the ground a short distance, in 
three days changing to the chrysalis. I showed in the Rural New 
Yorker , September 22nd, 1877, that this was not always the case, since 
I have taken them from the lower part of their holes in the corn 
stalks, and I find Mr. Riley also had notes, made since his first arti¬ 
cles were printed, that they do not always change in the ground. The 
chrysalids are “ of the normal form with two fine bristles at the extrem¬ 
ity of the body, usually closed so as to form a point, but readily 
opened V shaped at the will of the insect, as with hundreds of others 
of the same class.” 
The moths appear during the latter part of August, and in the 
month of September, hibernating during the winter, and in early 
spring depositing their eggs. 
Complaints of their ravages have come from Dr. E. R. Boardman, 
of Elmira, and F. M. Webster, Waterman, Illinois, the former of 
whom had fifteen acres of corn destroyed by the depredations of this 
insect, while Mr. Webster says, they have been a serious cause of com¬ 
plaint on account of the injury done by them to many fields of corn. 
The only notes outside of the State with reference to the injury to 
corn, I find in the American Entomologist Vol. I., page 252, wherein 
Mr. F. M. Norton, of Farmington, Conn., states, it did great damage 
to the corn in that state in 1869; and from an extract of a letter to 
Mr. Riley, bearing the date of 1871, that it was found occurring in 
great numbers in corn in Centreville, Mo. 
They are general feeders, infesting both our marketable produce as 
well as flowers and noxious weeds. 
In a small home garden owned by Mr. John W. Dyson, of Galva,, 
Illinois, I found the larva of this moth in the stalks of his coin,, 
potato, tomato, spinach, and dahlia; this was the more noticeable' 
when I observed the almost entire freedom from the same in the 
neighboring gardens. The cause of the superabundant supply may 
have been clue to the absence of fowls which were generally kept by 
those surrounding. 
Dr. Wm. Le Baron, the late State Entomologist of Illinois, in his 
2nd report, page 141, quotes from a letter received from Wisconsin, 
that the wheat stalk had suffered from this insect in the summer of 
1872. It is not confined to a few kinds of plants for nourishment, but 
is found in the stalks of tomato, potato, spinach, wheat, corn, the 
dahlia, aster, lily, spirea, salvia, in the milk-weed, caster-bean, rhu¬ 
barb, Chenopodinm eupatorium, in the twigs of peach and currant. It 
also occurs in the stalks of the common cocklebur, Xanthium strumar- 
—8 
