LETTERS ON ENTOMOLOGY. 15 
happiness in living in a country where every 
evil of the kind is comparatively slight; yet even 
here whole crops are sometimes destroyed by 
other insects. That most important plant, wheat, 
has many assailants ; one of the earliest is a grub 
which eats into the plant, about an inch below 
the surface of the earth, devouring the middle, 
which soon kills the plant. The larvae of a 
particular kind of beetle cause great destruction 
in a similar maimer j and, not content with this, 
the perfect beetle itself afterwards attacks, by 
night, the grain when in the ear. The far 
famed Hessian jiy which spreads such dismay 
wherever it appears, and made such ravages in 
North America that it threatened the total de- 
struction of the culture of wheat, was erroneously 
supposed to have been carried there from Ger- 
many by some Hessian soldiers. It commences 
its operations in autumn, as soon as the plant 
begins to appear above ground, when it devours 
the leaf and stem with equal voracity, until 
stopped *by the frost. When spring returns, the 
fly appears again and deposits its eggs in the 
heart of the main stem, which it perforates, and 
so weakens, that when the ear begins to grow 
heavy and is about to pass into the milky state, it 
breaks down and perishes. All the crops, as far 
