1. The _Slug_ may be described as a houseless snail. There are several species, but the milky slug (_Limax agrestis_) and the black slug (_L. ater_) are those most common to our corn crops, and are more especially mischievous to wheat; for, as this crop usually succeeds clover or “seeds,” in which they breed most rapidly, so, the older the clover lea, the more eggs will be ready to hatch in the wheat crop, and this all the more readily as the wheat is nearly always put in with a single ploughing, and with as little cultivation as possible. The best remedy will be found in encouraging insectivorous birds—the lark, rook, starling, peewit, and others, eating them either in the egg or young state with great avidity; a good assistance to whose labours may be supplied in a few broods of ducks from the farmyard, which it will pay well to have tended by a good boy—where such can be found—as these birds are most efficient as destroyers of slugs and caterpillars. Store pigs turned into old leas, where they can do no mischief, will get no bad living where snails and insects abound. _Wire-worms._—The several species of beetle which produce the wire-worm belong to the genus _Elater_. They are of a long oval shape: about half the length belongs to the head and thorax, and the other to the abdomen. Every schoolboy knows that when he holds the insect on its back it elevates the abdominal portion, and again lets it fall so as to make a beating sound; and hence its generic name, and also its common name of click-and-hammer beetle. If he remove his finger when in this position, the creature immediately skips up and turns on its feet, from which action it has got the name of “skipjack.” Curtis has estimated nearly seventy species of click-beetles as producing wire-worms in this country; but the three following are those generally met with—_Elater lineatus_, _E. obscurus_, and _E. ruficaudis_. These all attack corn and almost every other kind of vegetable. The larvæ of these are very much alike, being hard, leathery, wiry caterpillars, which vary in length to about three-quarters of an inch, according to age. These are mostly smooth, and have six feet on their thoracic segments, and a false foot or _proleg_ in the middle of the underpart of the terminal section of the abdomen—characters by which wire-worms may be distinguished from all others. Their length varies with age; as they live for some years in the larva state, so the different sizes mark so many broods, which in some fields are annually provided for. It should here be observed that the wire-worm does not breed; these larvæ can only be hatched from the eggs of the female click-beetle: hence, then, destroying the worms prevents the development of their parent.