NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 95 
and in short of the life and conversation of these animals, is a 
necessary step to lead us to some method of preventing their 
depredations.* 
As far as I am a judge, nothing would recommend entomology 
more than some neat plates that should well express the generic 
distinctions of insects according to Linnzus ; for I am well assured 
that many people would study insects, could they set out with a 
more adequate notion of those distinctions than can be conveyed 
at first by words alone.T 
* Many good papers have been published upon the insects injurious to the husbandman 
and gardener, and the Messrs. Loudon and Westwood have translated Koller’s German 
treatise upon ‘‘ Noxious Insects.” The harvest bug, as it is popularly termed, leptus 
autunmadlis, Latreille, is generally very abundant where it does occur, and is extremely 
troublesome ; it is, however, local, most abundant in the south, and in Scotland by no 
means frequent ; it attacks both mankind and animals; we have seen the nose of a dog liter- 
ally red with their numbers. ‘The fly attacking bacon-hams Mr. Bennet refers as similar 
to that which infests cheese, ¢yvophaga casee, but of this I am not quite sure, and recom- 
mend some of our readers who may keep hams up their chimneys to send specimens to 
the ‘‘Gardener’s Chronicle,” who will submit them to their able entomologist Mr. 
Westwood. The insect most usually known as the ‘‘turnip-fly” is, as Mr. White ob- 
serves, a small beetle, Zaltica nenzorum, by some called flea-beetle, from being an active 
jumper. This minute insect commits most serious depredations to the crops when in the 
seed-leaf, and some seasons a vast extent is destroyed. ‘This present year, 1853, in the 
south of Scotland, it has been extremely destructive, and a very great breadth of crop 
has been sown a second time. ‘The insect is very generally distributed, and I have never 
missed finding it among a young crop, but its depredations are most successful when dry 
weather or any other cause prevents the young plant from growing freely and vigorously. 
The best remedy, therefore, is to have the land well managed and in good condition from 
manure ; in most seasons this will have the effect of producing the young plants strong 
and healthy, and causing them to grow so rapidly as to be very soon beyond the ravages 
of the fly. A clergyman at Dorste, in Hanover, mentions that he has employed, success- 
fully, an infusion of wormwood to water the drills, or the application of very dry dust ; 
but these could scarcely be employed upon a large extent of farm, although useful in a 
garden. Numerous other applications are recommended, but one of the easiest, and said 
to be efficacious, is that of smoke by means of weeds, or any other material kindled, so 
as to be carried across the field by wind. There may be occasional seasons remarkable 
for drought or cold, and inimical to rapid vegetation, but these are exceptional, and the 
ordinary remedies will in all probability be unavailing. 
But there is another insect scourge to the turnip-field, which fortunately is not nearly 
of such frequent occurrence; it is one of those insects that return at times without 
warning, the periodicity of which has not been accounted for. It belongs to the same 
family as the caterpillar which attacks gooseberry-bushes, and which must be so generally 
known, and both are the Jarve of what are called ‘‘saw-flies.” The caterpillars do the 
injury, and when they do appear they are in thousands, and soon strip the tender or leaf- 
part of the turnip plant, which is sometimes in a considerably advanced state when the 
ravages commence, generally after hoeing has been performed. The’ surest remedy is 
hand-picking by children. This is the A thadléa centifolia of entomologists; the popular 
name of the caterpillar ‘‘ black dolphin.” 
+ There are several works now of this kind. .Curtis’s ‘‘ British, Entomology” has 
dissections of the parts from which the generic characters are taken, but this is expensive. 
Westwood’s ‘‘ Introduction to the Modern Classification of Insects” gives capital wood- 
cut illustrations of the parts, besides other information. This work is in 2 vols. Svo. 
