56 GOOSEBERRY-GRUB. 



his cabbages ; and then he will give you a toss of his wise 

 head, and utter, with a gravity quite in keeping, " I knew 

 there would be a blight this year ; I saw it coming in the 

 air." Perhaps, however, he may find a good many snails 

 eating his wall-fruit ; or may, perchance, tread on two or 

 three great stag beetles while performing their evening 

 perambulation along his gravelled walks ; and then, he 

 " knew it would be either a blight or a sneg ; but it's more 

 of a sneg this year." Further than this, the horticulturist 

 has not progressed ; webs and soft insects are < blights;' 

 snails and hard insects are ' snegs.' Warm south-east winds 

 produce the first ; cold north-east winds, the last ; and yet 

 the same man would laugh in your face if you were to say 

 seriously, on a cold misty morning, " There will be a rise 

 in the funds tomorrow, I can see it in the air." I main- 

 tain that there can hardly be a greater service performed 

 to horti- and agri-culturists, than by pointing out to them 

 the nature and habits of their insect enemies; and their 

 laughing at us in the first instance, will perhaps be repaid 

 by their thanking us at last. 



I have never known the GOOSEBERRY-GRUB * such a 

 nuisance as it has been this year. In April I saw the fly 

 very busy on the wing, and it continued so to the middle 

 of May. I prophesied the havoc it would make, but I 

 managed to save my own gooseberries by keeping the gar- 

 den in a cloud of smoke for the benefit of the apple-trees ; 

 a practice not altogether grateful to the optics or olfacto- 

 ries, but decidedly beneficial to the fruit-crops, not that the 



* It is necessary to observe that in arranging these Letters for the press, I 

 have disregarded the chronological order of their appearance. The present 

 letter on the gooseherry-grub was the last written, having been printed in the 

 ' Entomologist,' so lately as August, 1841. Those which follow were originally 

 published about eight years earlier. E. N. 



