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1 give you a sketch of the leaf, showing this first stage of the evil, be- 

 cause at this period the progress of the plague may be an'ested, and 

 I consider it important to make horticulturists acquainted with its ex- 

 act appearance : the grubs are too small to be shown, you will there- 

 fore understand that the appearance of the leaf is all that I aim at in 

 the figure. At this nick of time, by a little care and industry, you 

 may save your gooseberries. Now that leaf has sixty-seven grubs feed- 

 ing on it : each grub will eat three leaves before it is full fed : argal, 

 if you destroy that one leaf and all its inhabitants you save two hun- 

 dred and one leaves. If you have no time to look for these leaves 

 yourself get some children to do it : they will soon take an interest in 

 the occupation, particularly if backed by a few coppers ; surely you 

 would not object to give a child a halfpenny a score for such leaves, 

 and that price would be quite sufficient to clear the vision and sharp- 

 en the intellects of many a hungry boy. I w^ould also recommend 

 young ladies to look after such leaves and pick them into a hand-bas- 

 ket, the contents of which may be emptied into a bucket of water stand- 

 ing near, or disposed of in a variety of ways. If you neglect the trees 

 at this critical time, each infected leaf will be quickly stripped of all 

 its green, the ribs alone remaining : the grubs then descend its foot- 

 stalk, and wandering in different directions each finds a leaf for him- 

 self, and the work of devastation begins in earnest. 



The grub is known to every gardener, indeed so well known that 

 you may perhaps consider it a waste of time and paper to describe it 

 here ; yet some of your readers may be glad of a description, so here 

 it is. There is a great difference between the grubs of sawflies — the 

 gooseberry grub is that of a sawfly — and the caterpillars of moths, 

 which your thorough-paced entomologists don't seem to have noticed. 

 The caterpillars of moths and butterflies have six legs, and ten, six, 

 or four holders, two of which are quite at the end of the body and are 

 very powerful prehensile organs, excepting — and the exception esta- 

 blishes the rule — in the caterpillars of puss-moths and their allies, in 

 which the hinder extremity is without these organs, and often elevated 

 in a most remarkable manner. In all the grubs of saw-flies that I 

 have seen the tail or last segment of the body is either without hold- 

 ers or does not use them, but just curls its tail on one side and uses it 

 after the fashion of a finger to steady its hold on the leaf, or else sticks 

 it up in the air, and even then the extreme end is curled round though 

 holding nothing. The legs are longer than those of real caterpillars 

 and have more joints. The gooseberry-grub has six legs, and in this 

 all insects that have any legs at all seem to agree, and twelve holders 



