CHERRY. LEAVES — CHERRY PLANT-LOUSE. ITS NUMBERS. 127 



leaf, whilst the Lady birds or Coccincllidce with their larvse and 

 Aphis-lions and other destroyers were equally numerous. All 

 fears as to the result were consequently allayed. Still I little an- 

 ticipated such a rapid and utter extermination of these vermin as 

 actually occurred. A week afterwards upon a careful examina- 

 tion not a living aphis could be found upon the leaves of any of 

 the trees, and the conquerors had already disbanded their forces 

 and had nearly all retired. The empty skins of the slain, adhe- 

 ring to the leaves, with the swollen bodies of others which had 

 been punctured by parasites — for these, too, it appeared, had 

 stepped in to give their progeny a share in the feast — were the 

 only relics of the teeming myriads which had so recently swarmed 

 there. It is by looking at the works of Nature in a definite man- 

 ner and tracing out her operations specifically and in their minute 

 details that we arrive at some faint conceptions of their magnitude 

 and grandeur, and become vividly impressed with the truth that 

 no other agency than that of a Creator .infinite in wisdom and 

 power could have peopled the world which we inhabit with such 

 countless numbers and such an endless variety of objects animate 

 and inanimate, each occupying its appropriate sphere, and all so 

 arranged as to fulfil the objects for which they were called into 

 existence. Has the reader as he has passed a forest ever at- 

 tempted to conjecture the number of trees which it contained ? 

 and has his mind passed onwards to a surmise of the probable 

 number of leaves growing upon each tree, and onwards still to 

 the number of insects which may be drawing their sustenance 

 from each one of these leaves, and still further to the number of 

 minute and infinitesimal parasites which may be subsisting upon 

 each of these insects 1 Among the cherry trees alluded to above, 

 was a row of seven young ones which had attained a height of about 

 ten feet. By counting the number of leaves upon some of the limbs 

 and the number of limbs upon the tree, I find a small cherry tree 

 of the size above stated is clothed with about seventeen thousand 

 leaves. And at the time alluded to these leaves could not have 

 averaged less than five or six hundred lice upon each, and there 

 was fully a third more occupying the stems and the tips of the 

 twigs. Each of these small trees was therefore stocked with at 

 least twelve millions of these creatures. And yet so vigilant, so 



