266 [Assembly 



lie completely adjusts the pipes, and supplies the place of dam- 

 aged pipes with sound ones. The drain is now ready for filling 

 in, which is rapidly done, and then the whole clod, first turned 

 up in almost one entire piece, is rolled on to its bed. We esti- 

 mate the benefit of Cotgreave's plan to be a saving of one-half the 

 cost, and nine-tenths of the time hitherto required. 



The Secretary read his translatioQ of an article on the plant 

 louse, in the Annales de la Societe Centrale ©'Horticulture, 

 Paris 1851. 



" The wool louse, the aphis mali or apple louse. All the 

 enemies of plants are for the most part as ancient as the plants 

 themselves. For we do not believe that divine power creates 

 now-a-days new physical enemies as the world grows older. 

 Europe, Asia, and Africa were known for many thousands of 

 yearsj but America was for the first time discovered by the 

 Genoese Christopher Columbus in 1492. The fourth part of the 

 world has now been known less than four hundred years. Be- 

 fore this discovery the plant louse was utterly unknown, cer- 

 tainly in Europe. It arrived (we know not how) sometime 

 about the commencement of the present century. I first re- 

 member it in Paris in 1830, and published an account of it in 

 the Annales. Since then it has multiplied and committed great 

 ravages among our young apj^le trees in the nurseries of Paris 

 and its environs. The London Horticultural Society has de- 

 ■scribed it under the name Eriosome. Academies offered pre- 

 miums for its destruction Fumigations, cream of lime, powder- 

 ed lime kill many but left more untouched — the impossibility of 

 applying remedies to large trees. An Englishman rubbed his 

 trees with old urine, and got entirely rid of the louse. Soft soap 

 has been tried. Mr. Viaril, nurseryman at Rouen, says that he 

 has found out an infallible remedy which destroys them all -, he 

 demands a high price fot his secret, so high that I dare not ask 

 the Society to ask him for it. He says : ' My nursery of sixty 

 thousand trees has not a plant louse in it, while my neighbors' 

 are devoured by them." 



