Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/226

222 ground by a variety of insects, and not a tuber nor a bulb escapes infestation.

The stems of herbaceous plants and shrubs and the trunks and branches of trees harbor borers without number and belonging to several orders. Vigorous growing vines like those of cucurbits may harbor several borers in a single stem, while even a wheat straw affords ample accommodation for several species, from the minute joint-worms to the caterpillars of owlet moths.

Fruit and other trees are attacked even in the nursery, and many a seedling never gets beyond the earliest stage of development. The temptation is great to enlarge on these points; but the difficulty would then be to find a stopping place. It must suffice to say that there is no part of a plant from the tip above to the rootlet below ground that

 The San José Scale as it appears on an infested shoot; from the Virginia Experiment Station.

may not be inhabited by a borer. Nor, on the other hand, is there a part of the outside of the plant above ground that may not be infested by scales or plant-lice.

Not so many years ago the Pacific Coast feared for its fruit industry because of the Cottony Cushion Scale, an imported pest. Still more recently the eastern United States was invaded by the San Jose Scale, another imported species which is responsible for more legislation, more organization, more expenditure of money and a greater revolution in methods of fruit growing, than any insect in history. No