2O6 



IRambles witb mature Students 



have been growing from a pip. Every few weeks 

 brown oval scales have to be scraped off the small 

 tree, else its health would be impaired, for these 

 apparently insignificant things are really live creatures, 

 each of them possessing six minute legs and a kind 

 of beak with which it bores into the stem and sucks 

 the sap of the plant. These scale insects are a 

 serious annoyance to gardeners, and give rise to an 

 immense amount of trouble, for they multiply 

 rapidly, and when once a plant is infested 

 with them there seems no remedy but 

 washing carefully each individual leaf, or 

 else syringing the entire plant with some 

 poisonous liquid. 



The life-history of the various scale 

 insects is not fully known, but in most 

 cases the male insect is a minute fly ; the 

 small tortoise-like brown atom which ad- 

 heres to the stem and leaves being the 

 female. 



There are many English species, and 

 PALM SCALE, unfortunately in importing foreign plants 

 we are apt also to import new kinds of 

 scale insects which find a congenial home in our 

 hothouses. The palm scale is one of the most con- 

 spicuous, and if we remove one of these from the 

 under side of a palm leaf in autumn we may, with 

 a lens, discern about fifty white eggs within the 

 brown shell, left there by the dead scale insect, ready 

 to hatch in due time and perpetuate her species. 

 On the fruit of both oranges and apples we may 

 often find the mussel scales (Aspidiotus conchiformis). 

 At the first glance we should take them to be 

 mere brown specks, but the exact form of the 



