240 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1891. 



often recover. The only measure that seems to have been tried for 

 combating the pest has been the collecting of the beetles by hand. 



We now come to the Boll worm (Heliothis armigera), which has 

 long been known as attacking the bolls of the cotton plant in the 

 United States and the pods of the opium poppy in India. These two 

 plants, however, form but a very small proportion of the diet of this 

 nearly omnivorous caterpillar, which will eat almost any succulent 

 seeds or shoots that it comes across, and is even said to fall upon other 

 caterpillars and devour them when more natural food is scarce. This 

 is believed to be the caterpillar which has been reported during the 

 past year as destructive to paddy plants in Backerganj and Khulna ; 

 the injury in one Sub-division of Backerganj indeed being estimated 

 at an anna in the rupee. It has also been reported by the Bengal 

 Excise Department as attacking the hemp plant in Bengal. The 

 habits of the insect no doubt vary to a certain extent with the loca- 

 lity in which it occurs and the plant upon which it feeds. For 

 instance, in cotton fields in the United States the chrysalis is formed 

 in the ground, while iu Indian poppy fields this stage is passed 

 inside the seed capsules of the poppy. But it seems pretty certain 

 that in each case the caterpillars pass the whole of their lives upon 

 the plants, several generations being gone through in the course of 

 the year. One way and another this insect undoubtedly does a great 

 deal of damage in India ; but as yet the only remedy which seems to 

 have been tried has been that of collecting the caterpillars by hand, 

 which does not seem a very promising way of getting rid of so small 

 an insect, though more can be done by hand-picking than is usually 

 supposed. 



We now come to the red spider, which perhaps should not come 

 within the category of the insects I have undertaken to tell you about 

 to-night — in the first place because it is not an insect, and in the 

 second place, because nobody took the trouble to send it to me 

 last year, though I feel quite safe in saying that it gave a lot of 

 trouble to tea-planters last year both in Assam and the Himalayas. 

 The fact is that the red spider is a mite which is almost always to be 

 found in the dry weather on tea bushes, under a fine web which it 

 spins on the old leaves. 



The damage which it does is due to its sucking up the juice of the 



