316 Miscellaneous. 



Dr. Lindley suggests, that had the foul plants been all burnt, or 

 dipped in hot water, so as to kill the bugs, the Ceylon coifee-planters 

 might have been saved from their present painful position. But 

 why were not these precautions taken 1 Simply because these 

 coffee-planters are wholly ignorant of entomology. Wlien Kalm, 

 the Swedish naturalist, descried specimens of Bruchus Pisi disclosed 

 in a parcel of peas he had brought from North America, he was 

 thrown into a state of trepidation lest some of these pestilent insects 

 should have escaped, and he should have been thus the unconscious in- 

 strument of introducing so great a calamity into his beloved country. 

 And had the Ceylon coffee-planter, to whom these infected Mocha- 

 plants came, possessed a far less amount of entomological knowledge 

 than Kalm, he would have cai'efully examined them, aware how 

 easily a new insect-pest may be introduced from a foreign country, 

 and of what vital importance it is that it should be ascertained that 

 such introduced plants are free from disease, or thoroughly cleansed 

 from it, if present. 



Here we have a further striking instance how desirable it is, as I 

 have before contended, that some instruction in Natural History, 

 and in Entomology as a branch of it, should be universally given in 

 all our schools, from the highest to the lowest. Not only may 

 a landed proprietor at home suggest to his tenants, or a country 

 clergyman to his flock, the best way of destroying their insect-ene- 

 mies ; but if our middle classes, likely to become in the course of 

 their emigrations to our colonies, now every year more extensive, 

 coffee-planters in Ceylon, or cotton-growers in India, or general 

 agriculturists in Canada, x\ustralia, or the Cape, were taught some- 

 thing at school of the history of these assailants, as well as the 

 working-men who accompany or assist them, there can be no doubt 

 that this branch of their school education would turn to far more 

 pecmiiary advantage than much of what is now taught them. 



In adverting to this subject in my last year's Address, I pointed 

 out how little merely "practical" but miscientific men are qualified 

 to cope with the insect-hosts that assail them on every side, and I 

 quoted the remarkable instance, which cannot be too often repeated, 

 of the 240,000/. a-year which M. Guerin-Meneville, the distinguished 

 French entomologist, has saved the olive-growers of the south of 

 France by teaching them a mode, founded on the economy of the 

 olive-fly (Dacus Olea;), of neutralizing the attacks of this pest, of 

 which, in spite of all their practical skill, they were the annual 

 \dctims to this large amount. I will conclude these remarks with 

 referring to the prospect we now have of seeing our hop-plantations 

 freed from their great destroyer the hop-fly {Aphis Humuli) — not 

 from the efforts of the hop-growers, who considering it "a blight" 

 brought by some cold wind or atmospheric change, fold their arms 

 in helpless apathy ; but in consequence of the investigations into the 

 history and economy of the insect by an eminent British entomolo- 

 gist, Mr. Francis Walker*, who has attended very closely to this 



* Annals of Nat. Hist. 1848, vol. i. p. 373. 



