THE CROTON BUG IN QUEBEC PROVINCE

Extract

One morning last November I went to the Chaudiere Curve, to meet the train from Halifax, which had been delayed for some hours. I found two men in the waiting-room who had spent the night there. They complained that swarms oi black beetles had troubled them all night so that they courld not sleep. Upon my questioning the correctness of the statement, they said, “Well, here they are in all the cracks,” and they forthwith commenced to poke the creatures out'. The insects were numerous enough, but they were not beetles, nor were they black. They were specimens of the German Cockroach, Ectobia Germanica. I afterwards enquired of one of the railway employes as to the time of the first appearance of the insects. The man told me that he first noticed them in 1882. I asked if they had appeared anywhere else in the neighborhood. “Yes,” he answered, “in my own house last winter; but,” he added, “I am not there in the day time, so I left the windows open and froze them out.”