INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 139 



turnip in great numbers ; and Sir Joseph Banks informs me that forty or 

 fifty of the insects before mentioned, called by Mr. Walford the wire- 

 worm, but more probably, as there observed, the larvae of one of the tribe 

 of Brachyptera or love-beetles, have been discovered in October just 

 below the leaves in a single bulb of this plant. — The small knob or tuber- 

 cle often observable on these roots is inhabited by a grub, which resembles 

 one found in similar knobs on the roots of sinapis arvensis (from which I 

 have bred Nedyus contractus and N. assimilis, small weevils nearly related 

 to each other), and like it produces a small weevil, Ceutorhynchus sulci- 

 collis. This, however, does not seem to affect their growth. Great mis- 

 chief is occasionally done to the young plants by the wire-worm. I was 

 shown a field last summer in which they had destroyed one-fourth of the 

 crop, and the gentleman who showed them to me calculated that his loss 

 by them would be 100/. One year he sowed a field thrice with turnips, 

 which were twice wholly, and the third time in great part, cut off by this 

 insect.^ The roots are also sometimes seriously injured by the caterpillars 

 of the moth (^Agrotis segetum) before mentioned, as destructive to wheat 

 crops on the Continent. Whether the disease to which turnips are sub- 

 ject, in some parts of the kingdom, from the form of the excrescences 

 into which the bulb shoots, called fingers and toes, be occasioned by 

 insects, is not certainly known.^ Another root, the Beet, which has within 

 the last twenty years been almost as extensively cultivated in France for 

 the manufacture of sugar as turnips with us, is much injured by a small 

 beetle, a new species of Cryptophagus described by M. Macquart (C. 

 Beta), which devours the plants as soon as they appear above ground.^ 



We have wandered long enough about the fields to observe the progress 

 of insect devastation : let us now return home to visit the domains of 

 Flora and Pomona, that we may see whether their subjects are exposed to 

 equal maltreatment. If we begin with the kitchen-garden, we shall find 

 that its various productions, ministering so materially to our daily comfort 

 and enjoyment, almost all sufter more or less from the attack of the animals 

 we are considering. — Thus, the earliest of our table dainties, radishes, 

 are devoured by the maggot of a fly (Anthomyia radicum), assisted by 

 those of a very small beetle (Latridius porcatus^^, and our lettuces by the 

 caterpillars of several species of moth ; one of which is the beautiful 

 tiger-moth {Ewprepia Caja), another the pot-herb-moth {Mamestra olera- 

 cea), a third anonymous, described by Reaumur, as beginning at the root, 

 eating itself a mansion in the stem, and so destroying the plant before it 

 cabbages.^ And when they are come to their perfection and appear fit 



' Trans. Ent. Soc. Land. ii. proc. xxx. A striking instance of the use of hand-picking 

 (in most cases by far the most effective mode of getting rid of insects) appeared in the 

 West Briton, a provincial paper, in November, 1838, stating that Mr. G. Pearce of Fennare 

 Goran had saved an acre and a half of turnips, sown to replace wheat destroyed by the 

 wire-worm and attacked by hosts of these larvae, by setting boys to collect them, who, at 

 the rate of three half pence per 100, gathered 18,000, as many as 50 having been taken 

 from one turnip. Thus at an expense of only 1/. 2s. 6d. an acre and a half of turnips, 

 worth from 5/. to 11. or more, was saved ; while as the boys could each collect fiOO per day, 

 30 days' employment was given to them at 9d. per day, which they would not otherwise 

 have had. 



2 Spence's Observations on the Disease in Turnips called Fingers and Toes, Hull, 1812, 8vo. 



' Ann. Sc. Nat. xxiii. 94. quoted by Westwood, Mod. Class, of Ins. i. 148. 



* Kyber in Germar's Mag. der Entom. i. 1, » Beaum. ii. 471. 



