pdf - Entomological Society of Canada

and grass-hoppers which infest the whole country ... are often as destructive
to the corn crops in Canada as Sampson's foxes were to the wheat of
the Philistines." He also stated that some of the grasshoppers in what is now
eastern Ontario and Quebec, were "as large as a field mouse" and so numerous
"that a single person with a waggoner's whip might drive ten thousand
of them before him with as great ease as a shepherd can drive a flock of
sheep. The whole face of the earth appears so thickly covered with them,
that crops of every description seemed destined to immediate destruction."
All interest in insects in the early nineteenth century was not of an exclusively
pragmatic nature, nor did it relate entirely to economic considerations.
Captain William Edward Parry's Northwest Passage expedition of 1819­
1820 brought back a few northern insects to Great Britain (W. Kirby 1824),
although it is scarcely surprising that no orthopteroid was among them. Some
were, however, collected (presumably as a pastime), about 1821, by an army
officer, Lt. R. S. Redman, in the vicinity of Halifax, N.S. Such orthopteroids
collected by Redman as we know of, are listed in the catalogs of F. Walker
(1869a, 1869b, 1870, 1871). The species, under their current names, are
Ceuthophilus maculatus (Harris), Scudderia curvicauda (De Geer), S. furcata
furcata Brunner von Wattenwyl, Conocephalus fasciatus (De Geer),
Allonemobiusfasciatus (De Geer), Melanoplus femurrubrum femurrubrum
(De Geer), M. bivittatus (Say), Dissosteira carolina (Linnaeus), Arphia
sulphurea (Fabricius), Pardalophora apiculata (Harris), Chorthippus
curtipennis curtipennis (Harris), and Tetrix ornata (Say). F. Walker (1872),
in his list of orthopteroids known from north of the United States border
(omitting reference to anything west of Ontario), bases his Nova Scotia
records entirely on Redman's material, all or most of which is still preserved
in the British Museum (Natural History), London. These seem to be the oldest
Canadian specimens still in existence, for they must have been collected not
later than the beginning of 1822, although not before the end of 1820.
Dr. John Jeremiah Bigsby, a keen naturalist (born 1792, died 1881), was
a member of the Canadian Boundary Commission and, at an early date in
his career, in the early 1820s, he visited, among other places, southern Lake
Huron and the surrounding regions (Bigsby 1824). He apparently collected
various natural history specimens at the time, for much later (Bigsby 1850)
he published a list of insects that he had collected, "principally in [sic] Lake
Huron." Although one cannot say for certain that these belonged to the early
period, it may be assumed that some, at least, did so. The names were Gryllus
bipunctatus (not of De Geer; other than that this was a cricket of some kind,
it cannot be identified); Acrida coeca and A. stenoptera (in earlier times,
Kirby used Acrida Linnaeus for Tettigonia Linnaeus; that these "species"
were tettigonioids with relatively broader or narrower wings, respectively,
is all we can say of them); Locusta borealis (Kirby used Locusta for anything
we should now place in the Acridoidea); and Acrydium 4-punctatum
(Kirby used Acrydium specifically for Tetrigoidea). This last species we can
tentatively identify because a specimen collected by Bigsby from Lake Huron
is listed as Tettix granulata (Kirby) (= Tetrix subulata (Linnaeus)) by
F. Walker (1871).
Captain George G. Back's Arctic Land Expedition of 1833-1835
(G. Back 1836) returned to the United Kingdom with a few insects. Among
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