4S° 



THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [December i, 1884. 



leaves and placet! them under the microscope, when it 

 was seen that though miny eggs had been washed off, a 

 good many still remained; the spider itself was in such 

 cases seen on the underneath portion of the leaf, almost as 

 free from wet as if it had been under an umbrella, as it were, 

 which Nature had kindly provided. 



There appears absolutely to be no remedy for spider 

 blight. Iu fact, if there were, it must necessarily be most 

 difficult of application over anything like a large area. — 

 Syringing with muddy water has been recommended, and 

 for the time it has seemed to be efficacious, but as the eggs 

 revive under the influence of the sun, the relief is only 

 partial ; besides which, it is difficult to apply such a remedy 

 over a large area. Some have propounded the theory that 

 the red spider only attacks weakly plants, and there- 

 fore that nutritious or well-manured soil is all that is 

 needed. No doubt, to a certain extent, this is correct, 

 in so far that a strong and healthy plant will better 

 be able to recover from a partial attack than one grow-, 

 ing on impoverished soil ; but it is hardly likely that 

 the spider should prefer old and exhausted, to young and 

 vigorous plant. We believe that, on one estate, " burn- 

 ing " was tried on a bad patch, and with success ; but 

 as a matter of fact, any rail remedy remains to be found 1 

 and so far as this goes, Mr. Wood-Mason's book has not 

 advanced matters much. However, it serves the good 

 purpose of recalling attention ts a very important sub- 

 ject, and he tells us clearly and plainly all that is at 

 present known on the subject. 



Planters might do go'»d service by variously experiment- 

 ing on small patches of busches affected by spider blight 

 and recording their experience carefully. Spider blight, 

 has come almost to be looked upon as so inevitable a mis- 

 fortune, that planters have, perhaps, become somewhat too 

 prone to accept the " inevitable " as such. — Indian Tea 

 Gazette. 



[As to a remedy, we have marked a passage from the 

 London Times regarding a mixture of oil, kerosene, quick- 

 lime and water, found effectual in the case of the phyl- 

 loxera on vines. — Ed.] 



THE TEA MITE AND TEA BUG. 

 The Indian Agriculturist contain some further 

 extracts from the recent work by Mr. Wood-Mason, 

 and the question of Hclopcllis Antonii being indigen- 

 ous to Ceylon appears to be set at rest — indeed it 

 seems strange it should ever have been raised, in view 

 of the statement that the name was given to a 

 Ceylon insect described and figured a quarter of a 

 century ago (that is in the time of Dr. Thwaites !) 

 by the French entomologist Signoret. * It is true that 

 Mr. F. Moore considered the tea bug of India a 

 distinct species which he named //. theivora, and 

 under this name Mr. Moeus, in his earlier reports, 

 mentioned the insect which attacked the Java cin- 

 chonas Ultimately, however, he and his colleagues 

 used //. Antonii as the proper name, convinced, we 

 presume, of the identity of the insect which attacked 

 cinchona and tea in Java and tea in India with the 

 Ceylon insect described by Signoret But, surely in 

 the annals of science there is nothing more curious 

 than that the Ceylou insect described by a French 

 entomologist (if from Ceylon it reached him,) should 

 never have been observed by so c ireful a natural- 

 ist as Dr. Thwaites, and that his successor, Dr. 

 Trimen, in recording his researches into the life history 

 of this very insect, should have expressed don I its 

 as to i s being indigenous. This insect, like the 

 coffee fungus, must have possessed in a wonderful 

 degree the power o concealing itself from observation, 

 until the time for its effective debut in force had arrived 

 It will ie interesting now to trace the source whence 



* The oidy question is whether there may not have been 

 nn error as to the source whence the specimens were 

 derived : not very probable. 



Signoret obtained his specimens. Scarcely from Mr. 

 Nietner, for, surely, he would have described the 

 creature himself. Aud yet it must be remarked that 

 ISietner devoted special attention only to the insects 

 which could be classed as " enemies of the coffee 

 tree," and we know that he sent entomological speci- 

 mens to Germany, whence they may have reached 

 France. Here is the distinct statement in Mr. Wood- 

 Mason's work : — 



The Tea-Bug of Assam. 

 The tr»a-bug is so closely allied to a Ceylonese insect 

 which was described and figured a quarter of a century 

 ago by the French entomologist, Siguoret, under the name 

 of Helopeltis antonii as to have been considered by no less 

 an authority than Professor Westwood to be only a vari- 

 ety of it. _ Mr. F. Moore, formerly Assistant Curator of the 

 East India Company's Musuem, however, has expressed 

 the opinion that it is a distinct species, and has bestowed 

 upon it the appropriate name of H. theivora. Five other 

 species of the same genus— namely, ft. nigra, and H. orac- 

 oiuformis from AVaigion and New Guinea respectively, H. 

 pellucida and E. collaris from the Philippines, aud H. 

 podayrica,* from some unknown locality— have been de- 

 scribed at different times by various entomologists, and con- 

 sidering how excessively meagre our kuowledge of Asiatic 

 capsida? is, it is probable that several more remain to be 

 discovered in the vast and imperfectly explored region lyiug 

 between the extreme limits of its ascertained distribution. 

 The tea-bug is therefore a member of a genus of capsidas 

 which is characteristic of 'he Indo-Malayan fauna, and ex- 

 tends in its distribution from North-Eastern and Southern 

 India (including Ceylon) through the Philippines to Waigiou 

 and New Guinea; aud in the absence of evidence of its 

 occurrence in any other region, we must consider it to be 

 the North-Eastern Indian representative of the genus, and 

 that it has not been introduced, but that it is truly in- 

 digenous to the country in which we find it— a view which 

 is confirmed by many parallel cases in the geographical 

 distribution of animals. 



The merit of being the first to discover the Helopeltis 

 theivora, and to bring it to the notice of entomologists 

 and of planters, belongs to Mr. S. E. Peal, a planter of the 

 Sibsagar district, in Upper Assam, who has published an ex- 

 cellent paper upon its ravages, in which he demonstrated 

 that the so-called " spotblight " was the work of this insect, 

 Mr. Peal thus describes the ravages caused by this pest : — 



" The general view of the tea is that shoots are all brown, 

 withered, and in fact dead, and the tea presents a generally 

 brown look, instead of the bright healthy green that is usual. 

 " On examining a tree so affected, if the blight has only 

 recently affected it, the appearance is very different from 

 that of a tree which has suffered some time. Iu the former 

 case the general growth and the look is normal, but the 

 youngest shoots and tips are more or less spotted with 

 brown, the size of the spots varying with the age of the 

 insect. If the bug is very young, the punctures are close 

 and minute and the discolorations coalescent, but if it is 

 full-grown, the spots are larger, say an eighth of an inch in 

 diameter. Again, if the punctures are recent, the colour is 

 pale brown aud darkest at the edges; but if one or two or 

 ruore days old, the spots are dark brown verging on black, 

 the entire leaf curling up aud withering completely if they 

 are close. 



" Iu the case of a tree that has suffered some time, aud 

 severely, the symptoms aie often less visible at first glance; 

 the dead leaves have mostly fallen off and the minute 

 shoots at the leaf-axils alone show the damage, and all 

 are dry and dead, there is less dead leaf showing, and in 

 its place we find dead ' tips ' everywhere. 



'• A more careful study will often show a still more 

 unpleasant fact, i. c, that ere it ceased entirely "to shoot 

 out, the tree had made many efforts to grow, all of which 

 had been rendered abortive;" and a branch that has not 

 yielded one single leaf or tip will present all the appi tr- 

 ance of having beeu very severely and persistently plucked. 

 " On the tips of the young vigorous shoot being punct- 

 ured, it has died as certainly as if nipped off, and the 

 eyes below in the leaf-axils shoot out vigorously, and 

 ere the bug cau do serious damage one or two shoots have 



* The tea-bug has gouty swellings up the thigh- , and may 

 possibly be this insect. 



