326 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



eaten unimpaired in its lustre, and mix v ery well with 

 water. To get a fine red, yellow, blue, green, or any 

 other colour or shade of colour, we should merely have 

 to feed our larvae with cloth of that tint^. 



TFcLV, so valuable for many minor purposes, and 

 deemed with us so indispensable to the comfort of the 

 great, is of still more importance in those parts of Eu- 

 rope and America in which it forms a considerable 

 branch of trade and manufacture, as an article of ex- 

 tensive use in the religious ceremonies of the inhabi- 

 tants. Humboldt informs us, that not fewer than 25,000 

 arrobas, value upwards of 83,000/., are annually ex- 

 ported from Cuba to New Spain, where the quantity 

 consumed in the festivals of the Church is immense 

 even in the smallest villages; and that the total export 

 of the same island in 1803 was not less than 4'2,670 ar- 

 robas, worth upwards of 130,000/.'' Nearly the whole 

 of the wax employed in Europe, and by far the greater 

 part of that consumed in America, is the produce of the 

 common hive-bee ; but in the latter quarter of the globe 

 a quantity by no means trifling is obtained from various 

 wild species. According to Don F. de Azara, the in- 

 habitants of Santiago del Estero gather every year not 

 less than 14,000 pounds of a whitish wax from the trees 

 of Chaco'^. 



In China wax is also produced by another insect, 

 which from the description of it by the Abbe Grosier 

 seems to be a species of Coccus. With this insect the 

 Chinese stock the two kinds of tree {Kan-la-chu and 

 C/ioni'la-chu) on which alone it is found, and which 



' Rcaum. iii. 95. " PolUkal Essay, iii. 62. 



' VoxjagedansVAmer, Merid. i. 162. 



