VINE-COCCUS. 123 



ence of the bitter blast, unrequited love. Even now tbe 

 wind is whistling under the door of my little room, in spite 

 of a leather binding, and heaving up my carpet into the 

 most unseemly convexities ; while the feathery snow is 

 driving in horizontal lines past my window ; yet at this 

 moment I hear the loud, monotonous song of the missel- 

 thrush, bravely defying wind and weather. 



Our vines are often annoyed, and sometimes rendered 

 barren, by an insect which is called the vine-gall, or VINE- 

 Coccus. The harm it does the vines is by pricking holes 

 in the rind, and thereby letting out the sap, or, as the gar- 

 deners scientifically term it, making the vines bleed. Our 

 climate is not hot enough for this insect to breed very fast 

 out of doors ; but in hothouses it thrives and swarms, of- 

 ten doing great mischief. Sometimes there are such hosts 

 of them, that the young shoots are covered with a white 

 cotton, which is in reality a resinous gum, produced by the 

 Cocci. The Coccus pierces the bark by means of a sharp 

 and long sucker, which goes to the very centre of the 

 shoot, causing the sap instantly to flow in abundance. 

 This piercing apparatus, although, like other insects' 

 mouths, in the head, is bent so far under the breast, that 

 it appeal's to proceed from that part, and I find has been 

 often so described. The Cocci in the young, or larva state, 

 are all alike; they look just exactly like little tiny tor- 

 toises fixed to the rind and sometimes the leaves, of the 

 vine. Like other animals, the Cocci are males and fe- 

 males ; the males are desperate rovers. When they are 

 tired of vegetating, they push a hole through the back of 

 their tortoise -like shell and fly away ; the females undergo 

 no change in form on coming of age, nor do they ever 

 break loose from their moorings. 



