Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/728

708 in accordance with the suggestion made in my last report, is more rational, and will prove a better safeguard: It is to furnish vessels, plying between the two countries, with cards giving illustrated descriptions of the insect in all stages, with the request that passengers and crew destroy any stray specimens that may be found. Let England and Ireland, together with the other European governments, co-operate with Germany in this plan, and have such a card posted in the warehouses of seaport towns, and the meeting-rooms of agricultural societies, and a possible evil will be much more likely avoided." Some English journals are discussing the question as to whether, with the more moist and cool climate of this country, the ten-line potato-beetle would thrive here even if imported. "There cannot be much doubt that it will rather enjoy the more temperate clime; for while it thrives best during comparatively dry seasons, both excessive heat and drought, as well as excessive wet, are prejudicial to it. It is argued by others that on the Continent of Europe our doryphora would not thrive if introduced; and, in a recent letter received from M. Oswald de Kerchove, of Gand, Belgium, author of an interesting pamphlet on the insect, that gentleman says, 'I do not think that the doryphora awakened by our early warm weather, could resist the effects of the late cold which we are apt to have in these European countries.' The idea that the climate of North America is less extreme than that of Europe is rather novel to us of the cisatlantic; and, from a sufficiently long residence in England, France, and Germany, I am decidedly

of opinion that they delude themselves who suppose that doryphora could not thrive in the greater part of Europe; and that to abandon all precautionary measures against its introduction on such grounds would be foolish. An insect which has spread from the high table-lands of the Rocky Mountains across the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic, and that flourishes alike in the Stales of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and in Maryland, Virginia, and Texas—in fact, wherever the potato succeeds—will not be likely to be discomfited in the potato-growing districts of Europe. Some few, again, have ridiculed the idea of the insect's passage to Europe in any state, arguing that it is an impossibility for any coleopterous insect to be thus transferred from one country to another. Considering that half