178 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



rica another species {B. Pisi, L.) is most alarmingly 

 destructive, its ravages being at one time so univer- 

 sal as to put an end in some places to the cultivation 

 of that favourite pulse. No wonder then that Kalm 

 should have been thrown into such a trepidation upon 

 discovering some of these pestilent insects just dis- 

 closed in a parcel of peas he had brought from that 

 country, lest he should be the instrument of introducing 

 so fatal an evil into his beloved Sweden^. In the year 

 1780 an alarm was spread in some parts of France, that 

 people had been poisoned by eating worm-eaten peas ; 

 and they were forbidden by authority to be exposed for 

 sale in the market : but the fears of the public were 

 soon removed by the examination of some scientific 

 men, who found the cause of the injury to be the insect 

 of which I am now speaking''. Another species of 

 Bruchus (B. pectinicornis^ L.) devours the peas in 

 China and Barbary. A leguminous seed, much used 

 when boiled as food for horses in India, known to Eu- 

 ropeans by the name of Gram^ but in the Tamul dia- 

 lect called Koloo, and by the Moors Coollec, is the ap- 

 propriate food of a fourth kind of Bruchus, related to 

 tht" last, but having the antenna?, which in the male 

 are pv'^ctinated, much shorter than the body. It is, per- 

 haps, I?- scutellaris, F. A parcel of this seed*^ given 

 me by Cn^tain Green was full of this insect, several 

 grains containing two. Molina, in his History of Chili, 

 tells us of a beetle, which he names Lucamis Pilmus, 

 that infests the bcsius in that country; — a circumstanca 

 quite at variance a> ith the habits of the Lucanida\ 



* Kalm's Travels, i. 173. * Amoreiix, 288. 



" I have raised plantsfrom this seed, which appear from the foliaje t* 

 belong cither to Pltaseolus or Dolichoi- 



