JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS. 
XXV 
in the present month’s number of the Magazine of Natural His- 
tory. 
Mr. Children exhibited specimens of the leaves of a pear-tree 
infested by a subcortical larva, which forms large blotches upon 
the leaves of the size of a sixpence, accompanied by a letter which 
had been forwarded to him by H. R. H. the duke of Sussex, from 
the forester of Lord Dinorben, giving an account of the injury 
caused by its attacks upon standard trees, and suggesting the use 
of gas-tar to be applied upon the walls in the neighbourhood of 
the trees upon which the larva undergoes its change to the chry- 
salis.* 
Mr. Westwood read a letter addressed to himself from W. Spence, 
Esq., comprising additional details upon the Scolytus destructor. 
After alluding to Mr. Westwood’s observations made to the So- 
ciety on the 1st August last, and to the step subsequently taken 
by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, of consigning to 
the axe four hundred of the finest trees in Kensington Gardens, 
which had been pronounced unclean, the writer proceeds, “ the 
test of ‘ uncleanness’ is by no means so simple as they (the 
Commissioners) perhaps suppose, the fact being that it often 
happens, as I have seen in instances without number, that an 
old elm may be pierced with innumerable holes, and seem filled 
with larvae, when there is not in reality a single one in it, the holes 
being made solely by the males for food, (according to M. Au- 
douin’s important observation on this head,) and all that is necessary, 
in order effectually to save the tree, being to shave off the outer 
rough bark, and to give it two or three coats of gas-tar, to keep 
off the females in future.” After alluding to the destruction of the 
elms in the promenades of all the large towns in the north of 
France, Montreuil, Dieppe, Rouen, Havre de Grace, Caen, St. Lo, 
Granville, &c., &c., Mr. Spence proceeds: “ one preliminary fact is 
of great importance, viz. that the prevalent idea even among Ento- 
mologists, that the female Scolyti attack only those elms which are 
beginning to perish from natural decay, is entirely erroneous. It is 
quite true that the female Scolyti never lay their eggs, except in 
trees in a languishing and declining state, but hundreds of obser- 
vations have proved to me the truth of M. Audouin’s observation, 
* This insect is evidently the larva of Tinea Clerckella, Linn., the habits of which 
have been partially detailed by Mr. Knight in the second volume of the new series 
of the Horticultural Society’s Transactions, and by whom the washing of the trees 
once a week with a weak infusion of tobacco in water at the end of May and during 
the month of June, at the period of the insect in the winged state, had a very bene- 
ficial effect in driving the moths away. (J. O. W.) 
