NOTES AND QUERIES. 191 
Drirtwoop AND Insect ATTACKs. 
As every ‘dweller by the sea” is aware, there is a large 
quantity of timber cast up on our shores every year. The most 
of it is either pine or fir, both sawn and round, and it is of all 
sizes. Most probably it has formed part of the deck cargo of 
vessels, and has been washed overboard in rough weather. A 
great deal of the round timber has the bark still upon it, and it 
is in this fact that a very serious danger lies to our plantations. 
As is well known, the inner bark of pine and fir trees is the 
breeding-place of many injurious forest insects, and under the 
bark of many of these stranded logs they are often to be found 
in hundreds. Ona single piece of pitwood, 6 ft. long by 6 ins, 
diameter at the small end, I have counted, of larve and full- 
grown insects, no less than 321 specimens of Hylurgus piniperda, 
and 25 of Pissodes notatus, all alive and apparently in vigorous 
health. A few logs carrying similar colonies would soon work 
havoc among sickly or backward plantations near where they are 
stranded, and no doubt many attacks around our coasts have 
proceeded from this source. My experience with this insect- 
infested derelict timber has been confined to the coast districts ; 
but woods in the inland mining districts are placed in the 
same danger where foreign pitwood is used, the insects hatching 
out while the timber is still on the surface of the ground. 
It is very probable that the parent insects deposit their eggs 
in the bark late in the autumn or early in spring, after the logs 
have been felled, and are lying in the forest before being conveyed 
to the port for shipment. They have therefore ample time to 
hatch out and develop into full-grown insects by the time the logs 
are landed in this country, well on in the summer. The wonder 
is that the sea-water does not destroy them, but they do not seem 
to suffer in the least from the immersion they have been subjected 
to on the derelict logs. 
The part of the country in which I am situated being on the 
Welsh side of the Bristol Channel, and quite close to the large 
coal-fields and coal-shipping ports of Glamorganshire, large 
numbers of these drifting logs are washed ashore in my neigh- 
bourhood. To judge from their bark and wood, the logs seem 
to belong to the maritime pine, Pinus Pinaster, and as extensive 
forests of that pine grow in the west of France, from whence 
