Waugh describes a trouble which he calls “flyspeck fungus”[173] found on fruits sent from the Southern States, in which small areas are thickly dotted with black spots; also a fruit-spot on plums from Texas caused, as he states, by an undetermined Phoma.[174] Starnes of Georgia describes a malady of the Triflora plums called “wilt,”[175] cause unknown, which he states is the most serious obstacle to the culture of this plum in the South. In this peculiar disease the foliage passes directly from a green, healthy state into a wilted and then parched condition, the death warrant being signed when a tree is once affected. In Oregon and Washington the Italian Prune is subject to a leaf-curl[176] which begins in mid-summer and curls the leaves conduplicately without withering but shriveling somewhat. As the season advances the leaves turn yellow and many of them drop. Neither cause nor cure is known. Smith described a plum-blight[177] of native plums in Georgia which “destroys large branches or even whole trees in mid-summer in the course of a few weeks.” INSECTS. Cultivated plums furnish food for a great number of insects. Many of the destructive insect pests of the several cultivated species of Prunus are known to have come from the wild plants of the genus, but others, and possibly the majority, come from over the seas. No less than forty species of insects may be enumerated as pests of the plum and many more can be counted as occasional parasites on one or another of the species. Of the formidable pests the plum curculio is probably the most troublesome. The plum curculio[178] (_Conotrachelus nenuphar_ Herbst) is a rough, grayish snout-beetle somewhat less than a quarter of an inch in length, an insect so familiar to fruit-growers as hardly to need a description. The female beetle pierces the skin of the young plums and places an egg in the puncture. About this cavity she gouges out a crescent-shaped trench, the puncture and trench making the “star and crescent” of the Ottoman Empire, hence the common name of the beetle, “The Little Turk.” The egg-laying process may be repeated in a number of fruits and from each egg a larva hatches within a week and burrows to the stone, making a wormy fruit. Most of the infested plums drop. In years past plum-growers relied upon jarring the beetles from the trees in the early morning, but the treatment was too expensive, and poisoning with an arsenate is now the chief means of combating the pest. Rubbish and vegetation offer hiding places for the insects and hence cultivated orchards are more free from curculio. Thin skinned varieties are damaged most by the insect but there are no “curculio-proof” plums.