168 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



great devastation in them ; as does that of another described by De Geer 

 under the name of Tenebrio lardarius} How much our fresh meat of 

 all kinds, our poultry and 6sh, are exposed to the flesh-fly, whose maggots 

 will turn us disgusted from our tables, if we do not carefully guard these 

 articles from being blown by them, you well know; — and assailants more 

 violent, hornets, wasps, and the great rove-beetle (^Creophilus maxillosus) , 

 if butchers do not protect their shambles, will carry off" no inconsiderable 

 portion of their meat. A small cock-roach (Blatta lapponica), which I 

 have taken upon our eastern coast, swarms in the huts of the Laplanders, 

 and will sometimes annihilate in a single day, a work in which a carrion- 

 beetle (^Silpha lapponica) joins, their whole stock of dried fish.^ The 

 quantity of sugar that flies and wasps will devour if they can come at it, 

 especially the latter, the diminutive size of the creatures considered, is 

 astonishing : — in one year long ago, when sugar was much cheaper than it 

 is now, a tradesman told me he calculated his loss, by the wasps alone, at 

 twenty pounds. A singular spectacle is exhibited in India (so Captain 

 Green relates) by a small red ant with a black head. They march in 

 long files, about three abreast, to any place where sugar is kept ; and when 

 they are saturated, return in the same order, but by a different route. If 

 the sugar, upon which they are busy, be carried into the sun, they imme- 

 diately desert it. What is very extraordinary, these ants are also fond of 

 oil. Sweetmeats and preserves are very subject to be attacked by a mi- 

 nute oblong transparent mite with very short legs, and without any hair 

 upon its body. Our butter and lard are stated to be eaten by the cater- 

 pillar of a moth (^Aglossa pinguinalis). Tyrophaga^ casei, the parent fly 

 of the jumping cheese-maggot, loses no opportunity, we know, of laying 

 its eggs in our fresh cheeses, and when they get dry and old the mite 

 (Acarus siro) settles her colonies in them, which multiply incredibly. 

 Other substances, more unlikely, do not escape from our pigmy depreda- 

 tors. Thus Reaumur tells us of a little moth whose larva feeds upon 

 chocolate, observing very justly that this could not have been its original 

 food.^ Both a moth and a beetle (^Si/Ivanus frumentarius ?) were detected 

 by Leeuwenhoek preying upon two of our spices, the mace and the nut- 

 meg.^ The maggots of a fly {Drosophila cellaris) are found in vinegar, 

 in the manufactories of which the perfect insects swarm in incredible num- 

 bers ; others I have found in wine, which turned to a minute fly, of a yellow 

 color, with dark eyes and abdomen, which, though near Anthomyia as to 

 its wings, appears to belong to a distinct genus not published by Meigen, 

 which in my MS. stands under the name of Oinopota ventralis^ ; and 



' De Geer, v. 46. This insect appears nearly related to Mr. Marsham's Corticaria pulla 

 {E. B. i. 11. 14. ; Latridius porcatus Herbst.), if it be not the same insect. 



^ Aman. Acad. iii. 345. 



^ This name has long been given to this insect, and the characters of the genus were 

 drawn by Mr. Curtis before the publication of Meigen's fifth volume (in which the genus 

 is called Piophila) ; it is therefore retained. See Curtis, Exit. Ent. t. J 26.) 



* Reaum. iii. 276. ^ Leeuwenh. Epist. 99. 



^ Though our foreign wines, after being deposited in bottles in our cellars, would seem 

 secure from the attacks of insects, a friend of S. S. Saunders, Esq. found, on removing his 

 stock from one cellar to another, that the corks of many of the bottles had been so eaten 

 as to let the wine leak out. The authors of this mischief seem to have been chiefly cock- 

 roaches, which had gnawed off the corks of the claret only so far as they were unimpreg- 

 nated with the wine; but finding the sweet flavor of the Persian shiraz and old hock more 

 to their taste, had encroached upon the corks of these so deeply as to allow the wine to 



