THE ISABELLA TIG E E-MO T H . 
355 
numbers of caterpillars and grasshoppers will be left to grow 
to maturity and disperse upon the uplands, by which means 
the evil will go on increasing from year to year; or they will 
be brought in with the hay to perish in our barns and stacks, 
where their dead bodies will prove offensive to the cattle, and 
occasion a waste of fodder. To get rid of “ the old fog ” or 
stubble, which becomes much thicker and longer in conse- 
quence of early mowing, the marshes should be burnt over in 
March. The roots of the grass will not be injured by burn- 
ing the stubble, on the contrary they will be fertilized by the 
ashes ; while great numbers of young grasshoppers, cocoons 
of catei pillars, and various kinds of destructive insects, with 
their eggs, concealed in the stubble, will be destroyed by the 
f:rc. In the Province of New Brunswick, the benefit arising 
from burning the stubble has long been proved ; and this 
practice is getting into favor here. 
During the autumn there may be seen in our gardens and 
fields, and even by the way-side, a kind of caterpillar (Fig. 
170) whose peculiar appearance 
must frequently have excited at- 
tention. It is very thickly clothed 
with hairs, which are stiff, short, 
and perfectly even at the ends, like 
the bristles of a brush, as if they 
haul all been shorn off with the shears to the same length. 
The hairs on the first four and last two rings are black ; and 
those on the six intermediate rings of the body are tan-red. 
The head and body of the caterpillar are also black. When 
one of these insects is taken up, it immediately rolls itself into 
a hall, like a hedge-hog, and, owing to its form and to the elas- 
ticity of the diverging hairs with which it is covered, it read- 
ily slides from the fingers and hand of its captor. It eats 
the leaves of the clover, dandelion, narrow-leaved plantain, 
imd of various other herbaceous plants, and on the approach 
of winter creeps under stones, rails, or boards on the ground, 
where it remains in a half-torpid state till spring. In April 
Fig. 170. 
