INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 205 



Otiorhynchus ? picipes before mentioned, if it be not 

 the same insect. This destroys the young vines, often 

 killing them the first year ; and is accounted so terrible 

 an enemy to them, that not only the animals but even 

 their eggs are searched for and destroyed, and to forward 

 this work people often call in the assistance of their neigh- 

 bours 3 . In the Crimea the small caterpillar of a Procris 

 or Ino (lepidopterous genera separated from Sphinx, L.) 

 related to /. Statices, is a still more destructive enemy. 

 As soon as the buds open in the spring, it eats its way 

 into them, especially the fruit buds, and devours the germ 

 of the grape. Two or three of these caterpillars will so 

 injure a vine, by creeping from one germ to another, 

 that it will bear no fruit nor produce a single regular 

 shoot the succeeding year 5 . Vine leaves in France are 

 also frequently destroyed by the larva of a moth ( Tortrix 

 vitana] ; in Germany another species does great injury 

 to the young bunches, preventing their expansion by the 

 webs in which it involves them c ; and a third ( Tortrix 

 fasciana) makes the grapes themselves its food : a similar 

 insect is alluded to in the threat contained in Deutero- 

 nomy 11 . The worst pest of the vine in this country is its 

 Coccus (C. Vitis). This animal, which fortunately is not 

 sufficiently hardy to endure the common temperature of 

 our atmosphere, sometimes so abounds upon those that 

 are cultivated in stoves and greenhouses, that their stems 

 seem quite covered with little locks of white cotton; which 

 appearance is caused by a filamentous secretion transpir- 

 ing through the skin of the animal, in which they envelop 



8 Host in Jacquin. Collect, Hi. 297. 



b Pallas's Travels in S. Russia, ii. 241. c Jacquin. Collect, ii. 97. 



d Deut. xxviii. 39. 



