UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 129 
many of the insects habitually regarded as unqualified pests, 
may directly or indirectly perform functions as important to 
the most valuable plants as the services rendered by certain 
tribes to the orchids. I say directly or indirectly, because, be- 
sides the other arrangements of nature for checking the undue 
multiplication of particular species, she has established a police 
among insects themselves, by which some of them keep down 
or promote the increase of others ; for there are insects, as. well 
as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect which 
fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of another 
insect which constitutes his food in some stage of his life, and 
this other again may be as injurious to some plant as his de- 
stroyer is to a different species. 
The ancients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang 
branches of the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that 
the insects which frequented the former might hasten the ripen- 
ing of the cultivated fig by their punctures—or, as others sup- 
pose, might fructify it by transporting to it the pollen of the 
wild fruit—and this process, called caprification, is not yet en- 
tirely obsolete.* 
The perforations of the earthworms and of many insect 
larvee mechanically affect the texture of the soil and its perme- 
ability by water, and they therefore have a certain influence on 
the form and character of terrestrial surface. The earthworms 
bee. In their fondness for honey they destroy the nest and at the same time 
the bee. The principal enemies of mice are cats and owls, and therefore the 
finest clovers and the most beautiful pansies are found near villages where 
cats and owls abound.”—PREYER, Der Kampf um das Dasein, p. 22. See 
also DELPINO, Pensieri sulla bdiclogia vegetale, and other works of the same 
able observer on vegetable physiology. 
* The utility of caprification has been a good deal disputed, and it has, I 
believe, been generally abandoned in Italy, though still practised in Greece.. 
See Browne, The Trees of America, p. 475, and on caprification in Kabylia, 
N. Bivesco, Les Kabyles du Djurdjura, in Revue des Deux Mondes for April 
Ist, 1865, p. 589; also, Aus der Natur, vol. xxx., p. 684, and Putpson, 
Utilization of Minute Life, p. 59. In some parts of Sicily, sprigs of mint, 
mentha pulegium, are used instead of branches of the wild fig for caprification, 
PITRE, Ust ve Siciliant, 1871, p. 18. 
