The Arizona sentinel., 1888-09-22
MOTHS AND ELECTRICITY.
The Worst Enemy Yet Encountered by All
 Sorts of Prolific Insects.

S1 may turn out to be highly beneficial to people who gain nothing by it direct y. During the moist evenings of Au- gust, while in the country
 The beetle booms
 Adown the glooms,
 And bumps along the dusk,
 and moths are flying everywhere with little to molest them or make them afraid to deposit their eggs, from which shall come the larvae to work havoc to vegetation, clothing and car pets, and spoil the temper of the thrifty housewife, the electric light stands up in the city and stays the moths by the million. Black pepper, turpentine, tobacco and cedar shaw ings may kill the larva, but they will not touch the immediate cause of the larvae. The electric light deals de- struction to the cause, though it is powerless to injure the worms" and ''bugs" that dig and burrow and gnaw among the precious things of man.
 Any body who looks by night at the electric lights of New York in summer will see them surrounded by countless moths lowering above and inevitably going to meet their fate. A dispatch from Easton, in Pennsyl- vanla, says that there was a great in- cursion of the moths in that city, and that when, in the morning, employees of the electric light company visited the lights they found on an average two quarts of dead butterflies" in each of the globes of the sixty-four lights, making a total of four bushels not to speak of the dead that had fallen to the ground-of these de- structive insects that had been lured to their death by the glowing carbon. On the same night Reading swarmed with myraids of moths, which made the air look as if snowstorm was falling. They obscured even the brill fancy of the electric lights; passers-by were covered with them, and finally burned the insects by the bushel. Doors and windows had to be shut in order to keep the pests from entering the houses. The miller" was abroad, and every body wore white hat. Great hosts of insects were killed by the electric lights, and but for those engines of destruction they would have lived and laid their eggs, greatly to the detriment of the vegetation and the household goods-if, perchance, any of them belonged among the tinea-of the Pennsylvanians.
 Eighteen hundred and eighty-eight has been a great insect year in the United States. Strange" worms" that were never seen before in the places where they have now put in an appear ance have crawled along the leaves of ping the branches of all their green. Moths of the South have migrated or been blown to the North, which has not hesitated to return the gift to the South. Insects and "bugs" that no bird would touch and that even the omnivorous chicken and turkey refused to gobble up, and which the oldest inhabitants had never laid eyes on before, have settled down or crawled up to-no man knows whence-the field and the kitchen gar den, till the farmer has stopped in his ordinary work and called out all hands and his whole household to gather the pests and make away with them in scalding water. It is fine year for the entomologist, whatever other peo- pie may think about it.
 Once, in speaking of certain sea fishes which were said to be threat ened with extinction by man, Prof. Huxley intimated that if every inhab- itant of the globe were a fisherman bent on catching those particular fishes, the supply could never be per- ceptibly reduced. And it may be that if the whole United States, both town and country, were studded with elec- tric lights, the enormously prolific insect would not be perceptibly thinned out. And yet for every moth that is killed in the city by the lights it is undeniable that the country or the town is benefited by the destruc- tion of as many eggs as that moth would have laid and as would have be- come larva and finally full-hedged moths, to lay still other eggs, multi plying like the farthings in the old horse shoe nail problem. r. Cona- naerciGI AdUerttSer.