iNIGGER. 101 



ill the field at Old Pond, and the turnips were not. Since 

 my last visit they had been swept from the face of the 

 earth. The land was everywhere as bare as on the day it 

 had been sowed. There was no speck of green for the 

 eye to rest on. It was a wild and universal desolation ; 

 and the black, crawling vermin that had caused the ruin 

 were clustered in bunches on the ground, or lingering 

 about the skeletons of the turnip-leaves. No plague of 

 Egypt could have been more effective : the mischief was 

 complete. Some fields received the blast a few days later 

 than others, but all had it : not one escaped, unless the 

 crop were swedes, and it is remarkable that these were 

 untouched. I will now give a somewhat more particular 

 history of this blight. The egg is of an oblong form and 

 pale colour, and is so firmly glued to the cuticle of the leaf, 

 that I have never been able to get one off without break- 

 ing it, but when the egg is removed it leaves, or rather 

 discloses a wound in the cuticle of the leaf, and I have lit- 

 tle doubt that this wound is made by the parent fly, in 

 order that the egg itself may receive nourishment from the 

 juices of the plant : this is perhaps a little hypothetical, 

 but there is a fact which seems to require such an expla- 

 nation, for the egg positively grows while still to all ap- 

 pearance an egg. At the end of four days its bulk is 

 nearly doubled, and by the ninth day, when the grub 

 comes out, it is actually three times as large as when de- 

 posited. Directly the young nigger is let out of the egg- 

 shell he begins eating away in right earnest ; the first on- 

 slaught is generally made as near as possible to the spot 

 where he was born, but after a day or two the edges of 

 the leaf seem to be most favoured by his attentions, and 

 here the whole family may be seen working with a will, 



