INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 135 



The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man beai 

 but a small proportion to those accidentally introduced by him. 

 Plants and animals often carry their parasites with them, and the 

 traffic of commercial countries, which exchange their jjroduets 

 with every zone and every stage of social existence, can not fail 

 to transfer in both directions the miaute organisms that are, in 

 one way or another, associated with almost every object important 

 to the material interests of man.* 



The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their prodigious 

 fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different 

 phases of their existence,t the security of the retreats into which 



telligent friend that, in the early part of this year (1882) a single manufactory 

 in Switzerland had multiplied a comparatively few pounds of the genuine 

 article into a quantity of honey equal to a season's supply for all the summer 

 visitors to that attractive country, and that in appearance and flavor this prod- 

 uct was scarcely inferior to bee-honey, that it was eaten in good faith at all 

 the hotel tables, and found to be equally wholesome. It is interesting to 

 observe that many of the methods recently introduced into bee-husbandry in 

 England and the United States, such, for example, as the removable honey- 

 boxes, are reinventions of Italian systems at least three hundred years old. 

 See Gallo, Le venti Giornate dell' AgricuUura, cap. xv. 



The temporary decline of this industry in Italy was doubtless in a great 

 measure due to the use of sugar which had taken the place of honey, but per- 

 haps also in part to the decrease of the wild vegetation from which the bee 

 draws more or less of his nutriment. 



A new wax-producing insect, a species of coccus, very abundant in China, 

 where its annual produce is said to amount to the value of ten millions of 

 francs, has recently attracted notice in France. The wax is white, resembling 

 spermaceti, and is said to be superior to that of the bee. 



* A few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in dis- 

 charging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the continent, was 

 fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown insect, which ran out 

 from a hide he was handling. 



The Phylloxera vastatrix, the most destructive pest which has ever attacked 

 European vineyards — for its ravages are fatal not merely to the fruit, but to 

 the vine itself — is said by entomologists to be of American origin, but I have 

 seen no account of the mode of its first introduction into Europe. 



f In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for several 

 years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefinitely pro- 

 longed. Dr. D wight mentions the following remarkable case of this sort : " I 

 saw here an insect, about an inch in length, of a brown color tinged with 

 orange, with two antennae, not unlike a rosebug. This insect came out of a 

 tea-table made of the boards of an apple-tree." Dr. Dwight found the "cavity 

 •whence the insect had emerged into the light," to be "about two inches in 



