Our Common Insects: A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, Gardens and HousesPackard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Science
Our Common Insects: A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, Gardens and Houses
Packard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Insects
The imported cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae), recently introduced from
Europe, is estimated by the Abbe Provatncher, a Canadian entomologist,
to destroy annually two hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of
cabbages around Quebec. The Hessian fly, according to Dr. Fitch,
destroyed fifteen million dollars' worth of wheat in New York State in
one year (1854). The army worm of the North (Leucania unipuncta), which
was so abundant in 1861, from New England to Kansas, was reported to
have done damage that year in Eastern Massachusetts exceeding half a
million of dollars. The joint worm (Isosoma hordei) alone sometimes cuts
off whole fields of grain in Virginia and northward. The Colorado potato
beetle is steadily moving eastward, now ravaging the fields in Indiana
and Ohio, and only the forethought and ingenuity in devising means of
checking its attacks, resulting from a thorough study of its habits,
will deliver our wasted fields from its direful assaults.
These are the injuries done by the more abundant kinds of insects
injurious to crops. We should not forget that each fruit or shade tree,
garden shrub or vegetable, has a host of insects peculiar to it, and
which, year after year, renew their attacks. I could enumerate upwards
of fifty species of insects which prey upon cereals and grass, and as
many which infest our field crops. Some thirty well known species ravage
our garden vegetables. There are nearly fifty species which attack the
grape vine, and their number is rapidly increasing. About seventy-five
species make their annual onset upon the apple tree, and nearly an equal
number may be found upon the plum, pear, peach and cherry. Among our
shade trees, over fifty species infest the oak; twenty-five the elm;
seventy-five the walnut, and over one hundred species of insects prey
upon the pine.
Indeed, we may reasonably calculate the annual loss in our country
alone, from noxious animals and the lower forms of plants, such as rust,
smut and mildew, as (at a low estimate) not far from five hundred
million dollars annually. Of this amount, at least one-tenth, or fifty
million dollars, could probably be saved by human exertions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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