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Fitchs Point Nov 10^th 1854
Robt W. Kennicott Esq.
My dear Sir:- Yours of the 5th just is recieved before
your previous one of Oct. 22d is answered. I fear you will find me rather
a negligent correspondent. I never enter my study in the morning but that some
insect is in my mind, which I am eager to take up and examine; and the examin-
ation of this one is sure to ^{bring to} my notice one, two or more others to be attended to next;
and I am impatient of anything which draws me off from this employment. And
when the mail brings in to me a half dozen letters at a time, as it often does, my
patience holds out only long enough to reply to those which demand immediate attention
- the others are laid aside, to a more leisure hour - which leisure hour not
arriving, weeks frequently pass by before I make out to reply, in those cases in which
I have nothing of special importance to communicate. Nay, I sometimes forget these favors
of a friend altogether, until another missive from the same source recalls him to my
mind afresh.
A gentleman with whom I fell in company on a steamboat on L. Michigan gave
me a full account of the observations he had made upon the Seventeen-year Locust - inclu-
ding the fact that the female makes two parallel slits in which to deposit her eggs.
But the fact mentioned in your last letter is new to me - that the twig thus wounded,
does not always wither and fall to the ground. Such twigs as are still alive in your
vicinity, it must be, will recover from the wounds they received - as the eggs being all
hatched, there will be no further invilation there, to prevent a recovery. I presume it is
those twigs which had the fewest wounds, which have thus survived. The wounds, I suppose,
are still plainly perceptible. If so, I should be glad to have you send me pieces of two
or three Twigs (from the apple tree especially) showing these wounds. You can enclose
them in a newspaper, by mail. As I shall give some account of this species in my
forthcoming Report, and as you have had, I suppose, good opportunities for examining