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other civil and military officers of the colony, and his govern- 

 ment was thus summarily terminated. The excesses with 

 which he is charged by Wentworth are of the most shameful 

 and atrocious character, and ought to he taken into account 

 in forming our estimate of his conduct on board the Bounty. 

 (See Wentworth's second edition, p. 203, and the note.) 

 Bligh died in December, 1817. 



Nothing was heard of the Bounty until 1809, when an 

 American vessel touched at the island which Christian had 

 selected as a retreat. For an account of this interesting 

 settlement see PITCAIRN'S ISLAND. 



The mutiny of the Bounty has partly been made the 

 subject of one of Lord Byron's poems, entitled the ' Island,' 

 which contains many passages of great beauty. 



See Narrative of the Mutiny on board H. M. S. Bounty, 

 written by Lieutenant W. Bligh ; Minutes of the Proceed- 

 ings on the Court- Martial, with an Appendix, by Edward 

 Christian, brother of Fletcher Christian. To this publica- 

 tion Lieutenant Bligh replied with great calmness, in a 

 pamphlet entitled An Answer to certain Assertions, fyc. 

 He rested his defence ' on the testimony of others," and on 

 the written orders issued during the voyage. ' These testi- 

 monials, I trust, will be sufficient to do away any evil im- 

 pression which the public may have imbibed.' He has not 

 accompanied them by any remarks, ' lest,' he adds, ' I might 

 have been led beyond my purpose, which I have wished to 

 limit solely to defence.' The account of his voyage to the 

 South Seas was published in 4to., pp. 264, London, 1792, 

 and contains charts, engravings, and a portrait of Bligh. A 

 popular account, entitled 'The Eventful History of the Mu- 

 tiny and Piratical Seizure of H. M. S. Bounty : its Cause 

 and Consequences,' forms one of the volumes of the ' Family 

 Library.' Murray, 1831. 



BLIGHT, a popular name for any kind of pestilence 

 which affects cultivated plants by curling up or destroying 

 their leaves and blossoms, or by giving them a yellow sickly 

 appearance, or by covering certain parts of them with un- 

 natural colours. To a term thus loosely applied no precise 

 meaning can be assigned ; for the effects to which it relates 

 are produced by causes of totally different kinds. The attacks 

 of insects, especially of the aphis, produce a curling in leaves, 

 and a stoppage of growth ; those of the eriosoma, tubercles 

 upnii the branches, and loose cottony tufts; caterpillars 

 spread their nets from branch to branch, destroying all they 

 meet with ; cold dry winds in the spring, or sharp night 

 frosts at the same period, cause an appearance of scorching ; 

 and finally the ravages of numerous parasitical fungi, some 

 of which are superficial and others intestinal, are the origin 

 of much that is popularly called blight. The attacks of in- 

 sects form a subject which it is the business of the entomo- 

 ]"L'ist to explain. Blight from the attacks of parasitical 

 fungi will be explained under the head of MILDEW; that 

 which is produced by meteorological influences may find a 

 brief notice in this place. 



Nothing can be more absurd than the explanations of this 

 malady as given by many writers on gardening, nor any- 

 thing more simple than it is in reality. One person talks 

 gravely of its being caused by certain transparent flying 

 vapours, which may sometimes take such a form as to con- 

 verge the sun's rays like a burning-glass. The fact appears 

 to be this : when a plant first produces its young branches 

 and leaves, all the new-born parts are tender and succulent, 

 nml part with their fluid matter with rapidity until the 

 solidification of the recently -created tissue has taken place. 

 To enable this function to be performed regularly and with- 

 out interruption, it is necessary, l.that the air should be in a 

 certain state of humidity, or the perspiring parts will lose 

 their aqueous particles too fast ; and, 2. that the tempera- 

 ture should not be low enough to destroy the tissue by rup- 

 turing its sides, or by any other cause. Suppose these con- 

 ditions to be maintained without interruption, leaves and 

 branches gradually become fully formed, and no blight 

 appears ; but if, as frequently happens in this country, the 

 air is rendered extremely dry by the prevalence of easterly 

 winds, the young parts perspire with such rapidity that the 

 loss thus occasioned cannot be made good by the roots, and 

 the consequence is that the tissue becomes dried up and 

 scorched as it were, or at all events is brought into a more 

 or less diseased condition. Such is blight properly so called, 

 if that term can be considered applicable to any particular 

 form of disease. It will be obvious that the only remedy 

 for this, after it has occurred, will be the restoration of the 

 atmosphere to the necessary state of humidity, or to a suffi- 



ciently equable temperature. For this, artificial means can 

 only be employed upon a limited scale, and perhaps the only 

 practice which is ever attended with much advantage is fre- 

 quently washing the blighted plants with a syringe. It has 

 by some been recommended that wet litter should be burned 

 to the windward of large tracts covered with blighted plants, 

 and it has been supposed that the smoke thus produced will 

 remedy it by destroying insects, its imaginary cause ; but if 

 any effect is ever obtained from such a practice, it is not by 

 the destruction of insects, but by the interposition of a canopy 

 of smoke at night between the plants and the sky, by which 

 radiation is stopped, and the severity of the cold diminished. 



Blight is often used to designate the mischief done by 

 those insects which are destructive to vegetation ; and con- 

 sequently many insects of various genera and even orders 

 must be included under this common denomination. It is 

 not our intention however to describe the habits of all these 

 various species, as they will be found under their respective 

 heads : at present, we shall confine ourselves to the history 

 of one species only, which has been carefully observed by 

 Mr. Lewis, and -which will be found in detail, in the first 

 number of the Entomological Society's Transactions. As 

 this history is a satisfactory explanation of the sudden ap- 

 pearance of certain insects infesting the apple, hawthorn, 

 and other trees, it is hoped that the vulgar idea of blight 

 breeding in the air, and coming with the wind, will, in a 

 great measure, be refuted. 



If the branches of the apple or hawthorn (particularly 

 the young branches) be carefully examined during the 

 winter months, certain little round and slightly convex 

 patches will be found. These patches are rather less than 

 the sixth of an inch in diameter, and generally attached to 

 the underside of the branches : each of these little patches 

 is the work of a small white or lead-coloured moth, studded 

 all over with black spots (Yponomeula padella, the small 

 ermine), and consists of a number of eggs (deposited in 

 the month of June) covered with a glutinous substance, 

 which is at first of a pale yellow colour, but by being ex- 

 posed to the weather soon becomes dark, and thus closely 

 resembles the branch. The eggs hatch early in the Au- 

 tumn, and the larvse remain confined within this covering 

 during the winter, at which time, if the case be opened, about 

 a dozen or more of these little larvae, which are of a yellow 

 colour, may be distinctly seen by means of a lens of very 

 moderate power. As soon as the trees begin to put forth 

 their leaves, the larva; make their escape from the covering, 

 and as they are yet very feeble, and cannot eat the epider- 

 mis of the leaves, and require protection from the weather, 

 they mine into the leaves, where they subsist upon the 

 parenchyma only. When their little frames are grown 

 stronger, so that they are able to bear the inclemencies of 

 the weather, perhaps also some particular state of the at- 

 mosphere being favourable, ' they make their way out, and 

 the anxious gardener, who has hitherto only observed the 

 brownness of the leaves, caused by the mining, but which 

 is by him attributed to the withering blast of an easterly 

 wind, is astounded when he perceives myriads of caterpillars 

 swarming on the trees, and proceeding with alarming ra- 

 pidity in their devastating course. The fact of their mining 

 sufficiently explains the reason of this sudden appearance : 

 it shows how one day not a single caterpillar may be visible 

 on the trees, and the next, they may be swarming with 

 larvas of so large a size as to rebut the idea of their having 

 been recently hatched.' The webs we so often see covering 

 the branches of apple-trees, and the hawthorn of the hedges, 

 are the work of the little caterpillar above mentioned ; 

 which after a time becomes of a lead-colour spotted with 

 black, and when full grown spins an oblong white cocoon, 

 within which it turns to the pupa, and shortly after the 

 moth hatches : this takes place generally in the month of 

 June. 



The aphides, or plant lice, are likewise great pests to 

 the gardener (see APHIS). It may be observed, however, 

 that as each infested plant has its peculiar aphis and as 

 the aphides are quite as numerous (if not more so) when 

 the plants are covered with a glass as when they are ex- 

 posed, it is absurd to imagine that blight is bred in the 

 air (the vulgar notion), and brought to these plants by the 

 wind. Certain winds may be more favourable than others 

 for hatching the young, which however are undoubtedly 

 deposited on the plants by the parent insect. 



BLIND, INSTRUCTION OF THE. Blindness per- 

 haps meets with more general sympathy than any other 



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