6 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



with them, the tiger, the lion, and the vulture are mild, 

 sober, moderate creatures ; for what is any of these in the 

 presence of an insect which, in four-and-twenty hours, con- 

 sumes thrice its own weight?" 



In temperate regions, too, the war of the insect against 

 man is equally desperate and continuous. Not many years 

 ago the public papers in Europe were occupied with articles 

 expressing the most gloomy fears for the noble oak and pine 

 forests of Germany. It was stated that millions of trees had 

 already fallen under the insidious attacks of a minute beetle 

 which laid its eggs in the bark, whence the larvae penetrated 

 between the bark and the wood, destroying the vital connec- 

 tion between those parts, interrupting the course of the sap 

 and inducing rapid decay and speedy death. 



In the North of France the public promenades were almost 

 everywhere shaded by avenues of noble elms. In very many 

 cases these trees were fast disappearing before the assaults of 

 a similar foe ; and the grand old elms of the London parks 

 were becoming so thinned that great alarm was felt, and the 

 resources of science employed for checking the mischief. Fifty 

 thousand trees, chiefly oaks, were similarly destroyed in the 

 Bois de Vincennes, near Paris. In all these cases the minute 

 but mighty agent was some species or other of beetle of the 

 genus Scolytus. In Servia and the Banat a minute fly occurs 

 from whose destructive assaults on cattle the inhabitants pe- 

 riodically suffer immense loss. A traveller arriving at Golubacs, 

 on the Danube, thus speaks of it : " Near this place we found 

 a range of caverns famous for producing the poisonous fly too 

 well known in Servia and Hungary under the name of the 

 Golubascer fly. These singular and venomous insects, some- 

 what resembling mosquitos. generally make their appearance 

 during the first great heat of the summer in such numbers as 

 to appear like vast volumes of smoke. Their attacks are 

 always directed against every description of quadruped, and so 

 potent is the poison they communicate that even an ox is 

 unable to withstand its influence, for he always expires in less 

 than two hours. This results not so much from the virulence 

 of the poison as that every vulnerable part is simultaneously 

 covered with these most destructive insects, when the 

 wretched animals, frenzied with pain, rush wildly through the 

 fields till death puts a period to their sufferings, or they 

 accelerate dissolution by plunging headlong into a river." 



Perhaps worse, however, than these, or any of them, are 

 mosquitos, which, regardless alike of tropical heat and arctic 

 cold, swarm in countless millions under both conditions ; not 

 that their virulence or fatality equals that of the tsetse of South 

 Africa or the zimb of Abyssinia, but because they are most 

 universally distributed. Those, terrible as they are, are limited 



