FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
121 
States, or the joint capital of all our na¬ 
tional banks; a loss greater than the en¬ 
tire annual expenditure of the federal 
government, including the cost of the 
army, the navy, pensions and interest on 
the public debt; a loss equal to the value 
of all the merchandise imported annual¬ 
ly into the country, and nearly seven times 
the total receipts of the postoffice de¬ 
partment, or the salaries of all the teach¬ 
ers in our public schools—this is the al¬ 
most incredible estimate of our annual 
loss through beetles, bugs and their kind, 
which the Washington savants ask us to 
accept. 
Whether the estimate is exact or not, 
we have only to remind ourselves of the 
havoc wrought by the boll-weevil in the 
cotton fields of the south and the Hes¬ 
sian fly in the wheat fields of the north, 
by the scale and whitefly in our orange 
groves, and the curculio, the cankerworm, 
the codling moth, and the tent caterpillar 
in the orchards of other sections, and by 
the Colorado potato bug everywhere be¬ 
tween the oceans ; of the prairies devastat¬ 
ed from time to time by hordes of grass¬ 
hoppers ; of the forests infested with cat¬ 
erpillars and borers; of the cattle infect¬ 
ed with Texas fever by ticks; of the men 
and women infected with various grave 
diseases by mosquitoes and house flies, 
and of how many hot days and dear dol¬ 
lars we have all spent in warring against 
these pests—we have only to remind our¬ 
selves of these things in order to gain 
some sense of the burden imposed upon 
us by these hosts of hostile insects. 
How shall they be kept in check? How 
shall this drain on our resources be di¬ 
minished? We resort to insecticides— 
sprays, poisonous fumes, what not—and 
these afford some relief. Meantime, 
there is fighting for us, day and night, 
if we stop to 1 think of it, a countless and 
patriotic army of birds, swift and skill¬ 
ful and untiring, and amazingly hungry. 
Among these are some forty varieties of 
woodpeckers; how marvelously acute the 
ear which hears the movement of the 
grub buried within the tree and accurately 
locates it, how astonishing the muscular 
power which drives the sharp bill into the 
wood again and again, with almost un¬ 
believable rapidity and precision of 
stroke; how wonderfully fashioned as a 
spear the barbed tongue which pulls the 
borer from his hiding place! Examine 
the stomach of a woodpecker, and you 
will find ants, grubs, caterpillars and scale 
insects in great numbers, most of them 
the farmer’s foes; 5,000 ants have been 
found in the stomach of a single “flicker.” 
How wonderful the chemistry by which 
the cardinal turns “adult beetles, grass¬ 
hoppers, crickets, flies, ants and their 
larvae” and rose bugs into brilliant feath¬ 
er and ecstatic song. Mr. E. IT. Forbush, 
ornithologist of the Massachusetts State 
Board of Agriculture, has recently report¬ 
ed some experiments with a number of 
chicadees which frequented an old apple 
orchard in that state. In the stomachs of 
four birds there were counted more than 
1,000 eggs of the canker worm; and in 
addition to this it was estimated that each 
chicadee devoured daily during the early 
spring, on an average, thirty female cank¬ 
er worm moths, each containing in her 
body more than 5,000 eggs, so that each 
bird destroyed more than 140,000 unlaid 
eggs, besides those already deposited, dur¬ 
ing the twenty-five days in which the 
cankerworms were creeping up the tree 
