390 INSECTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. 



placed among the clothes, when they are laid aside for the 

 summer. Furs, plumes, and other small articles, not in con- 

 stant use, are best preserved by being put, with a few tobacco 

 leaves, or bits of camphor, into bags made of thick brown 

 paper, and closely sewed or pasted up at the end. Chests of 

 camphor-wood, red cedar, or of Spanish cedar, are found to 

 be the best for keeping all articles from moths and other ver- 

 min. The cloth linings of carriages can be secured for ever 

 from the attacks of moths by being washed or sponged on 

 both sides with a solution of the corrosive sublimate of mer- 

 cury in alcohol, made just strong enough not to leave a white 

 stain on a black feather. Moths can be killed by fumigating 

 the article containing them with tobacco smoke or with sul- 

 phur, or by shutting it in a tight vessel and then plunging the 

 latter into boiling water, or exposing it to steam, for the space 

 of fifteen minutes, or by putting it into an oven heated to 

 about one hundred and fifty degrees of Fahrenheit's ther- 

 mometer. 



Stored grain is exposed to much injury from the depreda- 

 tions of two little moths, in Europe, and is attacked in the 

 same way, and apparently by the same insects, in this coun- 

 try. Not having had sufficient opportunity to examine these 

 insects myself, I have been obliged to rely upon the accounts 

 given by foreign writers, for most of the following particulars 

 respecting their history. 



The European grain-moth {Tinea granella), in its perfected 

 state, is a winged insect, between three and four tenths of an 

 inch long from the head to the tip of its wings, and expands 

 six tenths of an inch. It has a whitish tuft on its forehead ; 

 its long and narrow wings cover its back like a sloping roof, 

 are a little turned up behind, and are edged with a wide fringe. 

 Its fore wings are glossy like satin, and are marbled with white 

 or gray, light brown, and dark brown or blackish spots, and 

 there is always one dark square spot near the middle of the 

 outer edge. Its hind wings are blackish. Some of these 

 winged moths appear in May, others in July and August, at 

 which times they lay their eggs ; for there are two broods of 

 them in the course of the year. The young from the first laid 



