132 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



(J5. pectinicornis) devours tlie peas in China and Barbary. A leguminous 

 seed, much used when boiled as food for horses in India, known to Euro- 

 peans by the name of Gram, but in the Tamul dialect called Koloo, and by 

 the Moors Cooltee, is the appropriate food of a fourth kind of Bruchus, 

 related to the last, but having the antennae, which in the male are pecti- 

 nated, much shorter than the body. It is, perhaps, B. scutellaris. A 

 parcel of this seed^ given me by Captain Green was full of this insect, 

 several grains containing two. Indeed, in tropical climates, the seeds of 

 almost every pod-bearing plant, as of the genera Gleditsia, Theobroma, 

 Mimosa, Robinia, he, are eaten by some species of IBruchus, as are the 

 cocoa-nut and palm-nut.^ Molina, in his History of Chili, tells us of a 

 beetle, which he names Lucanus pihnus, that infests the beans in that 

 country ; — a circumstance quite at variance with the habits of the Lucan- 

 idcB, which all prey upon timber. This insect was probably a Phaleria, 

 in which genus the mandibles are protruded from the head, like those of 

 Lucanus ; and one species, as we have seen above, feeds upon maize. 



Great profits are sometimes derived by farmers from their crops of 

 clover-seed : but this does not happen very often ; for a small weevil 

 {Apion jlavifemoratuni) , which abounds every where at almost all times 

 of the year, feeds upon the seed of the purple clover, and in most seasons 

 does the crop considerable damage; so that a plant of the fairest appear- 

 ance will, in consequence of the voracity of this little enemy, produce 

 scarcely anything. Another species (^Apion Jiavipes) infests the Dutch 

 or white clover.^ The young plants of purple clover, when just sprung, 

 are often, as Mr. Joseph Stickney pointed out to me, much injured by the 

 same little jumping beetles (Haliica) that attack the turnips. In Ger- 

 many, where Rape is more extensively grown than with us for the seed, 

 the crop sometimes wholly fails from the attacks of a small grub, supposed 

 to be that of a weevil of the genera Nedyus or Ceutorhynchus, which, 

 piercing the stalks from the base to the summit, deprives the blossom of 

 the due supply of sap, and thus causes it to perish.^ 



But not only, if let loose to the work of destruction, might insects 

 annihilate our grain and pulse ; they would also deprive the earth of that 

 beautiful green carpet which now covers it, and is so agreeable and so 

 refreshing to the sight. When you see a large tract of land lying fallow, 

 as is sometimes the case in open districts, with no intervening patches of 

 verdure, how unpleasant and uncomfortable is it to your eye ! What then 

 would be your sensations were the whole face of the earth bare, and not 

 dressed by Flora ? But such a stale of things would soon take place if, 

 to punish us, or to teach us thankfulness to the great Arbiter of our fate, 

 the insects that feed upon the grass of our pastures were to become as 

 generally numerous as they are occasionally permitted to do. One of the 

 worst of these ravagers is the grub of the common cockchafer (^Melolontha 

 vulgaris). This insect, which is found to remain in the larva state four 

 years, sometimes destroys whole acres of grass, as I can aver from my 



> I have raised plants from this seedj, which appear from the foliage to belong either to 

 Phaseolus or Dolichos. 



2 Weslwood, Mod. Class, of Lis. i. 330. ; and in Lotidon's Gardener^s Mag. No. R7. p. 287. 



^ Markwick, Marsliam, and Lehmann, in Linn. Trans, vi. 142 — . ; and Kirby in ditto, 

 ix. 37. 42. n. 10. 23. 



■' Keferslein in Silbermann's Eevue Ent. i. 135. 



