79 
considerable damage by detaching and causing the roots to dry, 
though these effects are usually attributed by farmers to very dif¬ 
ferent causes.” 
While the observations recorded in the present paper v ere in 
progress, I published in the “Prairie Parmer” of Chicago, for May 
14 1887 a brief illustrated notice of the occurrence ot these in¬ 
sects in’the meadows and pastures of Southern Illinois, connect¬ 
ing them with a serious destruction of the roots of grass and 
clover and a consequent deadening. of considerable patches m 
meadows and pastures. In this article was given also a brie 
summary of the results of feeding experiments. 
In a letter received from Dr. Riley, of the U. S. Department 
of Agriculture, June 24, 1887, I am informed that one species did 
great injury in California, in 1874, to growing grass, alfalfa, and 
clover. “They seemed,” he says, “to show a preference for open 
soil, and cut off the plants about three fourths of an inch from 
the surface, working in colonies and occupying areas from one 
eighth of an acre to live acres.” The species here complained o_ 
he thinks identical with T. iephrocephala, which is very common 
all over the Eastern United States and is not unfrequently found 
very thick in grass lands. The injury in California was bneiiy 
referred to by Dr. lliley in the “New York Weekly Tribune for 
April 8 1874. In the same letter T. bicornis is mentioned as 
received from Indiana in 1884, where, however, it was not known 
to be especially injurious. In England, and on the Continent, 
some species are very widely known to farmers and gardeners as 
destructive enemies of forage plants, small gram, turnips, cab¬ 
bages, and the like, and are treated in every general work on 
farm and garden insects. Our American species have apparently 
different average feeding habits, and depend, it is to be presumed, 
much more exclusively on dead and decaying vegetation than do 
the more abundant of their European allies. I am not aware, 
however, that precise experiments have hitherto been _ mane o 
learn the choice of food made by our common leather-jackets, or 
meadow maggots (as they have lately been called in Illinois); and 
it is possible that they do more general and considerable injury 
than lias been suspected. 
Concerning a single species, the commonest here in 1886 and 
1887. I have recently collected information which shows it to be 
capable of at least intensifying the damage done by drouth to 
meadows of clover, blue grass, and timothy. A very general and 
serious injury to grass and clover lands in many paits o 
Southern and Central Illinois—severest and most general to the 
southward—was frequently associated in those years with great 
numbers of large, dirty gray, footless maggots—the larvae ot this 
insect—found among the roots, where the latter had oeen so eaten 
away that the plants were killed and loosened from the ground, 
often in patches of considerable size. Specimens collected here 
contained in their stomachs a mixture of dead and living vegeta¬ 
tion-roots and leaves of grass—as did others placed m sod and 
kept under observation in breeding cages. 
