APHIS. 65 



of patches of potatoes, peas or beans, they are sure to be 

 more infested than when in a close bed : the reason for 

 this seems to me that the soil for all our culinaries is made 

 as light as possible ; this is effected by constant digging, 

 hoeing or raking : in a bed filled with gooseberry-bushes, 

 on the contrary, there is but little moving of the earth go- 

 ing on, and it gets trodden hard when the gooseberries are 

 ripening, and commonly remains so through the year. 

 This hardening of the soil prevents the grubs from burrow- 

 ing when they come down from the bushes, so they go 

 wandering about and become a prey to the hedge-spar- 

 rows, house-sparrows, whitethroats, robins, and obese toads 

 that are always on the look-out for them : it also prevents 

 so feeble an insect as the fly from forcing its way upwards 

 from the cell in which it has changed ; thus those on the 

 surface and those under the surface are alike assailed by 

 the simple expedient of hardening the soil. I have tried 

 numberless experiments on the grubs themselves, and find 

 them very easy to kill : brine, tobacco-water, snuff-water, 

 and other mixtures are fatal ; but these remedies, like the 

 once celebrated flea-poison, require the capture of the ani- 



mal in order to their being administered with effect. 



THE true blight, or APHIS, is a quiet, dull, stupid look- 

 ing animal, mostly without wings, but he sometimes has 

 four, two of which are much larger than the other two, 

 and fold over and hide them, reaching beyond the body 

 and meeting together behind it ; these wings are generally 

 as clear as crystal, with a few veins in them, yet if you 

 hold the insect in the sunshine, and examine him through 

 a glass, you will find they take all the colours of the rain- 

 bow ; you will also find he has a long trunk or sucker, 

 which is used as a pump or siphon, through which the 



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