4i BRITISH APHIDES. 



circumstance that viticulture in the open country is 

 but little attended to in England, no very serious 

 evils have yet arisen from the far more destructive 

 insect Phylloxera vastatrix, whose attacks are con- 

 fined to the grape vine. It may be also said that 

 no insect, large or small, has been honoured by such 

 a voluminous literature as this destructive pest. 



The appearance of some minute insects on the 

 leaves of a vine growing in a greenhouse at Hammer- 

 smith caused the Rev. M. J. Berkeley to bring the 

 subject to Prof. Westwood's notice, and an article 

 was written by that author on the same insect in the 

 ■ Gardeners' Chronicle ' for 1863, p. 584. Prof. West- 

 wood gave this insect the name of Perytimbia vitisana. 



This small beginning has developed into the investi- 

 gations of the commissions connected with the Govern- 

 ments of France, America, Italy, the Cape of Good 

 Hope, and elsewhere ; all of which inquiries have been 

 conducted at the public expense. Their reports have 

 been supplemented by valuable memoirs written by 

 Lichtenstein, Planchon, Riley, Cornu, Signoret, Bal- 

 biani, and a host of others. A large proportion of 

 these memoirs are to be found scattered in the 'Comptes 

 Rendus,' and the Transactions of the Natural History 

 Societies of Europe and America. 



Here we have another illustration of the natural fact 

 that to the world at large the interest and the import- 

 ance of a subject is often measured by the effect it 

 may have on our social economy. The loss of many 

 millions of francs or dollars to a country, leading to 

 the decay of an important industry, forces numerous 

 biological and scientific questions on the public notice, 

 which, apart from such a stimulus, would be regarded 

 with an utter apathy, and suggest thoughts that time 

 spent in such a subject would be lost in puerilities. 



The painful industry of the man of science who at his 

 life-hazard studies the minute Bacillus, and traces its 

 connection with tuberculosis or the fatal splenic fever — 

 or again, investigates the sequence of such-like micro- 



