112 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



by Joshua Haworth, jun. Esq., of Hull, that it equally infests other trees 

 in the neighbourhood. Even the fruit of a golden pippin which he sent 

 me were thickly beset with it. But the insect which most injures our 

 apple-trees by drawing off their sap, and which has been known in this 

 country only since the year 1787, is the apple-aphis, called by some the 

 Coccus, and by others the American blight. This is a minute insect, covered 

 with a long cotton-like wool transpiring from the pores of its body, which 

 takes its station in the chinks and rugosities of the bark, where it increases 

 abundantly, and, by constantly extracting the sap, causes ultimately the 

 destruction of the tree. Whence this pest was first introduced is not 

 certainly known. Sir Joseph Banks traced its origin to a nursery in 

 vSloane Street ; and at first he was led to conclude that it had been im- 

 ported with some apple-trees from France. On writing, however, to 

 gardeners in that country, he found it to be wholly unknown there. It 

 was therefore, if not a native insect, most probably derived from North 

 America, from whence apple-trees had also been imported by the proprietor 

 of that nursery. Whatever its origin, it spread rapidly. At first it was 

 confined to the vicinity of the metropolis, where it destroyed thousands of 

 trees. But it has since found its way into other parts of the kingdom, 

 particularly into the cyder counties; and in 1810 so many perished from 

 it in Gloucestershire, that, if some mode of destroying it were not dis- 

 covered, it was feared the making of cyder must be abandoned. Sir Joseph 

 Banks long ago extirpated it from his own apple-trees, by the simple 

 method of taking off all the rugged and dead old bark, and then scrubbing 

 the trunk and branches with a hard brush. 1 



Even in the very commencement of their existence our choicest apple- 

 trees are attacked by insects ; for the young grafts, as I am informed by an 

 intelligent friend Mr. Scales, are frequently destroyed, sometimes many 

 hundreds in one night, in the nurseries about London, by Curculio vastator 

 Marsh. (Otiorhynchus notatus), one of the short-snouted weevils ; as are 

 in the neighbourhood of Warsaw the grafts of this and other fruit-trees 

 by a smaller weevil Polydrusus (Nemoicus) oblongus*, which with us eats the 

 leaves of both apple and pear trees. The blossoms, in common with those 

 of the pear and cherry, are attacked by the figure-of-eight moth (Episema 

 cfcruleocephala), which Linne denominates the pest of Pomona; and still 

 more effectually by the grub of a reddish long- snouted weevil (Anthonomus 

 pomoruni), which, eating both the blossom and organs of fructification, 

 precludes all hope of fruit. If this danger be escaped, and the fruit be 

 set, it is then in Austria often destroyed by Rhynchites Bacchus, the same 

 splendid weevil which attacks the cherry ; and Reaumur has given us the 

 history of a species of moth common in this country (Carpocapsaj)omonella), 

 the caterpillar of which feeds in the centre of our apples, thus occasioning 



1 This Aphis is evidently the insect described in Illiger's Maqazin, i. 450. under 

 the name of A. lanigera, as having done great injury to the apple-trees in the 

 neighbourhood of Bremen in 1801. That it is an Aphis and no Coccus is clear from 

 its oral rostrum and the wings of the male, of which Sir Joseph Banks had an ad- 

 mirable drawing by Mr. Bauer. On this Aphis see Forsyth, 265. ; Monthly Mag. 

 xxxii. 320. ; and also for August, 1811 ; and Sir Joseph Banks in the Horticultural 

 Society's Transactions, ii. 162. Those Aphides that transpire a cottony excretion 

 are now considered, as before stated, as belonging to a distinct genus, under the 

 name of Lachnus, Illig. ; Myzoxyle, Blot ; Eriosoma, Leach. 



2 Ann. Soc. Ent. de France, viii. Bull. viii. 



