INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 20? 



If we quit the orchard and fruit-garden for a walk in 

 our plantations and groves, we shall still be forced to 

 witness the sad effects of insect devastation ; and when 

 we see, as sometimes happens, the hedges and trees en- 

 tirely deprived of their foliage, and ourselves of the shade 

 we love from the fervid beam of the noon-day sun ; when 

 the singing birds have deserted them ; and all their music, 

 which has so often enchanted us by its melody, variety, 

 and sweetness, has ceased we shall be tempted in our 

 hearts to wish the whole insect race was blotted from the 

 page of creation. Numerous are the agents employed 

 in this work of destruction. Amongst the beetles, various 

 cockchafers (Melolontha vulgaris, Amphimalla sohtitialis, 

 and Phyllopertha horticola] in their perfect state act as 

 conspicuous a part in injuring the trees, as their grubs 

 do in destroying the herbage. Besides the leaves of 

 fruit-trees, they devour those of the sycamore, the lime, 

 the beech, the willow, and the elm. They are some- 

 times, especially the common one, astonishingly nume- 

 rous. Mouffet relates (but one would think that there 

 must be some mistake in the date, since they are never so 

 early in their appearance,) that on the 24th of February 

 1574 such a number of them fell into the river Severn 

 as to stop the wheels of the water-mills 3 . It is also re- 

 corded in the Philosophical Transactions., that in 1688 

 they filled the hedges and trees of part of the county of 

 Galway in such infinite numbers, as to cling to each other 

 in clusters like bees when they swarm ; on the wing they 

 darkened the air, and produced a sound like that of di- 

 stant drums. When they were feeding, the noise of their 

 jaws might be mistaken for the sawing of timber. Tra- 



3 Mouffet, 160. 



