THE COMMON ROSE-CHAFER. 
35 
or light reel. The males are sometimes entirely black, and 
this variety seems to he the beetle called atrata, by Fabricius. 
The males measure nearly, and the females rather more than 
seven twentieths of an inch in length. In the year 1825, 
these insects appeared on the grape-vines in a garden in this 
vicinity ; they have since established themselves on the spot, 
and have so much multiplied in subsequent years as to prove 
exceedingly hurtful to the vines. In many other gardens 
they have also appeared, having probably found the leaves of 
the cultivated grape-vine more to their taste than their natu- 
ral food. Should these beetles increase in numbers, they will 
be found as difficult to check and extirpate as the destructive 
vine-chafers of Europe. 
The rose-chafer, or rose-bug, as it is more commonly and 
incorrectly called, is also a diurnal insect. It is the Fig _ 1(5 
Melolontha subspinosa (Fig. 16) of Fabricius, by 
whom it was first described, and belongs to the 
modern genus Macrodactylm of Latreille. Common 
as this insect is in the vicinity of Boston, it is, or 
was a few years ago, unknown in the northern and 
western parts of Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, and in 
Maine. It may, therefore, be well to give a brief description 
of it. This beetle measures seven twentieths of an inch in 
length. Its body is slender,' tapers before and behind, and 
is entirely covered with very short and close ashen-yellow 
down ; the thorax is long and narrow, angularly widened in 
the middle of each side, which suggested the name si/bspi- 
nosa, or somewhat spined ; the legs are slender, and of a 
pale red color : the joints of the feet are tipped with black, 
and are very long, which caused Latreille to call the genus 
Macrodactylm , that is, long toe, or long foot. 
The natural history of the rose-chafer, one of the greatest 
scourges with which our gardens and nurseries have been 
afflicted, was for a long time involved in mystery, but is at 
last fully cleared up.* The prevalence of this insect on the 
* See my Essay in the Massachusetts Agricultural Repository and Journal, 
