INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 133 



great devastation in them ; as does that of another described by De Geer 

 under the name of Tenebrio lardarius. 1 How much our fresh meat of all 

 kinds, our poultry and fish, are exposed to the flesh-fly, whose maggots 

 will turn us disgusted from our tables, if we do not carefully guard these 

 articles from being blown by them, you well know; and assailants more 

 violent, hornets, wasps, and the great rove-beetle (Creophilus maxillosus), 

 if butchers do not protect their shambles, will carry off no inconsiderable 

 portion of their meat. A small cockroach (Blatta lapponica), which I 

 have taken upon our eastern coast, swarms in the huts of the Laplanders, 

 and will sometimes annihilate in a single day, a work in which a carrion- 

 beetle (Silp/ia lapponica) joins, their whole stock of dried fish. 2 The 

 quantity of sugar that flies and wasps will devour if they can come at it, 

 especially the latter, the diminutive size of the creatures considered, is 

 astonishing: in one year long ago, when sugar was much cheaper than 

 it is now, a tradesman told me he calculated his loss, by the wasps alone, 

 at twenty pounds. A singular spectacle is exhibited in India (so Captain 

 Green relates) by a small red ant with a black head. They march in long 

 files, about three abreast, to any place where sugar is kept; and when 

 they are saturated, return in the same order, but by a different route. If 

 the sugar, upon which they are busy, be carried into the sun, they 

 immediately desert it. What is very extraordinary, these ants are also 

 fond of oil. Sweetmeats and preserves are very subject to be attacked by 

 a minute oblong transparent mite with very short legs and without any 

 hair upon its body. Our butter and lard are stated to be eaten by the 

 caterpillar of a moth (Aglossa pjnguinalis). Tyropkaga* casei, the parent 

 fly of the jumping cheese maggot, loses no opportunity, we know, of laying 

 its eggs in our fresh cheeses, and when they get dry and old the mite 

 (Acarus siro) settles her colonies in them, which multiply incredibly. Other 

 substances, more unlikely, do not escape from our pigmy depredators. 

 Thus Reaumur tells us of a little moth whose larva feeds upon chocolate, 

 observing very justly that this could not have been its original food. 4 

 Both a moth and a beetle (Sylvanus frumentarius ?} were detected by 

 Leeuwenhoek preying upon two of our spices, the mace and the nutmeg. 5 

 The maggots of a fly (JDrosophila cellaris') are found in vinegar, in the 

 manufactories of which the perfect insects swarm in incredible numbers ; 

 others I have found in wine, which turn to a minute fly, of a yellow colour, 

 with dark eyes and abdomen, which, though near Anthomyia as to its 

 wings, appears to belong to a distinct genus not published by Meigen, 

 which in my MS. stands under the name of Oinopota ventralis 6 ; and some- 



1 De Geer, v. 46. This insect appears nearly related to Mr. Marsham's Cor- 

 ticaria pulla (E. B. i. 11. 14. ; Latridius porcatus Herbst), if it be not the same 

 insect. 



2 Amcen. Acad. iii. 345. 



3 This name has long been given to this insect, and the characters of the genus 

 were drawn by Mr. Curtis before the publication of Meigen's fifth volume (in 

 which the genus is called Piophtta) : it is therefore retained. (See Curtis, Brit. 

 Ent. 1. 126.) 



4 Eeaum. iii. 276. 5 Leeuwenh. Epist. 99. 



6 Though our foreign wines, after being deposited in bottles in our cellars, would 

 seem secure from the attacks of insects, a friend of S. S. Saunders, Esq., found, on 

 ^removing his stock from one cellar to another, that the corks of many of the bottles 

 had been so eaten as to let the wine leak out. The authors of this mischief seem to 

 have been chiefly cockroaches, which had gnawed off the corks of the claret only so 



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