I must take up a little of your valuable time in offering my best thanks for the exceedingly interesting transmission, received through your kindness this morning. Your own “Insect Life,” 3 pts.; “The Root Knot disease”; and Mr. Koebele’s “Australian Thrips” are all very valuable contributions to my library, and I greatly wish I were able to reciprocate more worthily. There is one point in reply to which, if you are quite willing, I should much like to be allowed to insert a few lines. It is to the paragraph headed “Traps for the Winter Moth Useless,” p. 289, of March No. of “Insect Life.” Mr. R. McLachlan is mentioned as having stated that traps which aim at destruction of the males of the Cheimatobia brumata, Winter moth (fig. [30]) are useless, as enough will remain to fertilize the winged females. This I should have conjectured to be a well-known fact—but it is not this point which we are in any way working on, in any of the prevention details with which I am myself acquainted. Our difficulty, as you will see mentioned in my thirteenth Report, if you will kindly turn to p. 67, is the transportation of the females in the act of pairing by the winged males to the trees. This is a point much observed in this country, and I have to-day once again had my attention drawn to this difficulty in the matter of prevention, by a Somersetshire correspondent who in confirmation of his observation has preserved the pair in his collection. It is solely to meet this difficulty that we use tarred boards and lights in any preventive operations with which I am connected. I do not see the “Gardeners’ Chronicle,” and I am not in communication with Mr. McLachlan or I would have replied in my own country and given the necessary explanations, but, if you approve, I should much like to be allowed to insert the above observations, otherwise the various Superintendents and myself might appear to your readers (whose good opinion I should like to merit) as wonderfully ignorant of what I believe is a well-known fact.
We have now formed a kind of Society Conference with Experimental Committee of some of our best orchard growers in the West of England for the purpose of themselves experimenting, and reporting to the frequently recurring meetings—as to the effects of Paris-green, London-purple, &c. At last our people are roused to feel that “greasing” will not do everything.
I shall look with exceeding interest to the result of your Hypoderma or œstrus (Warble and Botfly) experiments. I sincerely hope that you will be able to rear the imago.
I have been greatly disturbed (and am consequently not writing you in as good form as I could wish) by a report being published in several of our London papers that I had been thrown from a carriage and met with serious injuries. This is altogether erroneous, but the many applications, and much writing and wiring to get the press to stop the report, has been indeed disturbing, and it has wasted me much time.
With kind regards and all good wishes from my sister and myself, pray believe me, yours very sincerely,
Eleanor A. Ormerod.
To Dr. L. O. Howard, Entomologist U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington.
Torrington House, St. Albans,
July 26, 1894.
Dear Mr. Howard,—I do not myself know what arrangements the Royal Agricultural Society of England made with John Curtis.[[68]]