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Here's where you plunge it is a gamble, a bet on the seed versus the eternal cussedness of things. It's you against the chances of a crop. If the drought comes, or the flood, or the chinch-bug, or the brown-tailed moth, you may find yourself floundering in the mulligatawney. Aside from that one cruise to the whaling-grounds, Rogers Pere played the game of life near home and close to shore.
The Apple Codling-Moth. Bulletin 41. Price 20c. The Gipsy Moth and How to Control It. Bulletin 275. The Brown-tail Moth and How to Control It. Bulletin 264. The Spring Grain Aphis or Green-Bug. Bulletin 93. The Army-Worm. Bulletin 4. The Hessian Fly. Bulletin 70. The Chinch-Bug. Bulletin 17. The Principal Household Insects of the U. S. Bulletin 4. Insects Affecting Domestic Animals. Bulletin 5.
Even here, however, the total loss is very great. Almost equally important is the damage wrought by the chinch-bug, which is also one of the greatest pests in wheat and oats. Every year in different sections of the country, bill-bugs, wire-worms, cutworms, cornstalk borers, locusts, grasshoppers, corn plant-lice and other insects, destroy millions of bushels of corn.
Some years the loss from the Hessian fly is very heavy, at other times comparatively light, yet there are few years when the loss is less than ten per cent. of the total crop from this insect alone, which meant last year a loss of 72,500,000 bushels. The chinch-bug is responsible for the loss of five per cent., or one bushel out of every twenty.
The Fire-flies now show their light during mild evenings, and on hot sultry days the shrill rasping song of the male Cicada, for "they all have voiceless wives," cuts the air: The Chinch-bug, that fell destroyer of our wheat crops, appears, according to Harris, in the middle of the month, and "may be seen in their various stages of growth on all kinds of grain, on corn and herds-grass during the whole summer."
And the myriad sufferings of the American migrants from hunger and thirst, from the freezing cold and the blasting, blistering, wilting heat, from the fevers of the new-broken lands, from the ravages of locust and grasshopper, and chinch-bug and drought, from isolation from human friendships, from want of gentle nursing even De Quincey's improvident travellers did not endure more, nor the children of Israel, to whose thirst the smitten rock yielded water, to whose hunger the heavens ministered with manna and the earth with quail, whose pursuing enemies were drowned in the sea that closed over their pathway, and whose confronting enemies in the land they entered to possess were overcome by the aid of unseen armies that were heard marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, or were seen by friendly vision assembling their chariots in the skies above.
Of the cereal crops, wheat suffers most from insects. Of the large number of insects that attack wheat, the three important species are the Hessian fly, the chinch-bug and the grain plant-louse or green-bug. The Hessian fly has been known to destroy as much as sixty per cent. of all the wheat acreage of a state.
All day long, the little beaks of the birds are busy. The dear little rose-breasted gross-beak carefully examines the potato plants, and picks off the beetles, the martins destroy weevil, the quail and grouse family eats the chinch-bug, the woodpeckers dig the worms from the trees, and many other birds eat the flies and gnats and mosquitoes that torment us so.
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