50 
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 
Food experiment. The sole recorded exception to the general¬ 
ization that the natural food of the chinch bug consists of species 
of grasses only, is that reported by Mr. Lawrence Bruner,* from 
Nebraska, according to whose observations one of the common 
species of Polygonum (wild buckwheat) was found infested by the 
bugs. 
A large lot of chinch bugs placed with a growing plant of 
Polygonum dumetorum, September 5, 1888, seemed at first to try 
to feed upon it, although close observation gave no positive evi¬ 
dence that they actually did so. Later they paid little attention 
to it, and in five days nearly all had died, chiefly in the bottom 
of the bell glass, where they had spent most of their time. The 
plant grew thriftily, and gave no evidence of attack. 
Early occurrence of the chinch hug in Illinois. —From W. T. 
Shelby, Esq., police magistrate and notary public at Olney, Illinois, 
born in Edwards county in 1820, I learned that the chinch bug de¬ 
stroyed a field of his father’s corn in 1828, on a place opened up 
about 1816, seven miles north of Albion. The insects covered the 
stalks so thickly that cattle did not like the fodder. This antedates 
by 12 years the earliest previously recorded occurrence of the chinch 
bug in Illinois,f and by three years its description by Say, who lived 
then, and had lived for six years previously, at New Harmony, 
Indiana, only about 25 miles from the locality above mentioned. 
It is an interesting circumstance that Say’s knowledge of this in¬ 
sect was based on a single specimen obtained on the eastern short 
of VirginiaJ. 
Effect of the chinch hug on grain and corn. —The fact seems 
not to have been generally noticed that both small grain and corn 
are frequently prostrated by chinch-bug attack,—the former mud 
as if infested by the Hessian fly. Corn evidently falls from lad 
of “brace roots,” whose development is arrested by the chinch 
bugs which collect at the base of the stalks and drain tin 
roots as they put forth. The injury thus done is not measured 
♦“Report on the Season’s Observations in Nebraska,” published in the Report of the U. S. De 
apartment of Agriculture for 1887, p. 166. 
fSee Bibliographical notes following this article. 
$Since writing the above I have received from Mr. Shelby, in confirmation of the above, the fol 
lowing letter under date of November 30, 1888:- 
“Chinch bugs appeared in Edwards county, seven miles north of Albion, in 1828, the year tha 
General Andrew Jackson was first elected President of the United States, and the Whigs, in derisioi 
of the Democrats or Jackson men, dubbed them “Jackson bugs.' 1 I am not mistaken, as thej 
almost destroyed a field of corn of my father’s, the fodder from which the stock did not like t< 
eat.” 
Mr. Shelly also writes, Dec. 12, 1888: “I have lately had a conversation with Mr. Elijah Nel 
son, who made a farm in 1820, two and a half miles west of where Olney now is, and he informs m* 
that chinch bugs appeared in the first crop of oats that was sown on that farm, as early a 
1823, and that his father told him that these were the same kind of bugs that they had in ol( 
Virginia. Mr. Nelson also tells me that in 1832 they appeared in considerable numbers and.did som 
damage to corn. Mr. Nelson is a reliable old-time resident.” 
