1896.] 



19^ 



be preserved. In this country, thanks in part to our changeable 

 climate, but probably still more to the comparative protection and 

 consequent abundance of our birds, really serious and destructive 

 insect visitations are happily far from common ; but from its extra- 

 ordinary fecundity, and the great activity combined with secluded 

 habits, of its larva, the present species succeeds in a series of favour- 

 able seasons in rendering itself a really destructive and alarming pest. 

 In my ov^^n experience this has never been more fully exemplified than 

 in the present season, and a few details may be of interest, especially 

 to those who have not been sufferers by it. 



I had determined this spring to make one more effort, at the end 

 of May or beginning of June, to re-discover the very rare and 

 interesting species, Madopa salicalis, which used, five and twenty 

 years ago, to occasionally gladden my eyes in the woods round Hasle- 

 mere, but which has been in recent years to all appearance absent. 

 Accordingly, in the beginning of June, I ran down, but upon what 

 again proved, in that respect, a fruitless errand. 



On the way, as soon as Wimbledon was passed, a peculiar 

 appearance of the woods (of whicb I had already heard) began to be 

 most manifest. Here and there a patch of trees, in other places 

 great belts of them, half a mile or a mile in length, and single trees 

 in every direction, all oaks, exhibited the most curious brown appear- 

 ance — not the blackness of a fire, nor quite the bareness of the winter 

 season — when, indeed, the oaks are not always so bare as some other 

 forest trees, but a peculiar brownness of bracts, and dead catkins, and 

 bits of leaf entangled in web, giving all the twigs a rough-coated 

 appearance, but without the relief of a single green leaf ; a series of 

 areas of desolation scattered through the otherwise lovely young 

 green of the woods and fields. On closer investigation it appeared 

 that some discrimination had been shown, some of the more advanced 

 oak trees had scarcely suffered at all, others bad half, or more than 

 half, their foliage devoured, but the great mass were absolutely 

 defoliated. Most of the larvae had at this time disappeared, and a 

 rain-storm or two had beaten down their threads of silk. Wherever 

 ivy climbed one of the trees every leaf of it was spun together, or to 

 the tree, dead leaves and living alike fastened down, and under or 

 between these were the black-brown pupae without number. At the 

 foot of other trees, where honeysuckle crept, it was twisted together, 

 and the leaves rolled or joined for the same purpose ; and elsewhere 

 on the aspen bushes, the tender and delicate leaves had been neatly 

 and beautifully folded into the most tantalizing and deceptive chambers. 



