144 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS, 



tree.^ The only insect I have observed feeding upon this fruit is the ant, 

 and the injury that it does is not material. The raspberry, the fruit of 

 which arrives later at maturity, has more than one species of these animals 

 for its foes. Its foliage sometimes suffers much from the attack of Melo- 

 loniha hordeola^, a little beetle related to the cock-chafer: when in flower, 

 the footstalks of the blossom are occasionally eaten through by a more 

 minute animal of the same order, Byturns tomentosus, which I once saw 

 prove fatal to a whole crop, and of which the larva feeds upon the fruit 

 itself; and bees frequently anticipate us, and, by sucking the fruit with 

 their proboscis, spoil it for the table. Gooseberries and currants, those 

 agreeable and useful fruits, a common object of cultivation both to poor 

 and rich, have their share of enemies in this class. The all-attacking 

 Aphides do not pass over them, and the former especially are sometimes 

 greatly injured by them ; their excrement falling upon the berries renders 

 them clammy and disgusting, and they soon turn quite black from it. In 

 July, I8I2, I saw a currant-bush miserably ravaged by a species of Coc- 

 cus, very much resembling the Coccus of the vine. The eggs were of 

 a beautiful pink, and enveloped in a large mass of cotton-like web, which 

 could be drawn out to a considerable length. Sir Joseph Banks once 

 showed me a branch of the same shrub perforated down to the pith by the 

 caterpillar of JEgeria tipuliformis : the diminished size of the fruit point- 

 ing out, as he observed, where this enemy has been at work. In Germany, 

 where, perhaps, this insect is more numerous, it is said not seldom to de- 

 stroy the larger bushes of the red currant.^ The foliage of these fruits 

 often suffers much from the black and white caterpillar of -<46raa;cfs grossu- 

 lariata, and sometimes from those of Halias Vauaria ; but their worst 

 and most destructive enemy is that of a small saw-fly (^Nematus Grossu- 

 laira. Dahlbom). This larva is of a green color, shagreened as it were 

 with minute black tubercles, which it loses at its last moult. The fly 

 attaches its eggs in rows to the under side of the leaves. When first 

 hatched, the little animals feed in society ; but having consumed the leaf 

 on which they were born, they separate from each other, and the work of 

 devastation proceeds with such rapidity, that frequently, where many 

 families are produced on the same bush, nothing of the leaves is left but 

 the veins, and all the fruit for that year is spoiled."* 



' This kind of misnomer frequently occurs in entomological authors. — Thus, for instance, 

 the Curculio (Rhijnchites) Alliariaof Linne, feeds upon the hawthorn, and Cnradio (Crypto- 

 rhynchus) Lapathi upon the willow (Curtis in Linn. Trans, i. 86.) ; but as AUiaria is com- 

 mon in hawthorn hedges, and docks often grow under willows, the mistake in question 

 easily happened : when, however, such mistakes are discovered, the Trivial Name ought 

 certainly to be altered. 



' I consider this insect as the type of a new subgenus (Phyllopertha K. MS.), which con- 

 nects those tribes of Metolontha F., that have a mesosternal prominence with those that have 

 not. Of this subgenus I possess six species. It is clearly distinct from Anisoplia, under 

 which De Jean arranges it. ^ Wiener Verzeich. 8vo. 29. 



* Fabricius seems to have regarded the saw-fly that feeds upon the sallow {Nematus Cap- 

 rece), not only as synonymous with that which feeds upon the osier, but also with our little 

 assailant of the gooseberry and currant. Yet it is very evident from Reaumur's account, 

 whose accuracy may be depended upon, that they are all distinct species. Fabricius's de- 

 scription of the fly agrees with the insect of the gooseberry, but that which he has given of 

 the larva belongs to the animal inhabiting the sallow. Probably, confounding the two 

 species, he described the imago from the insect of the former, and the larva (if he did not 

 copy from Reaumur or Linn6) from that of the latter. Linn6 was correct in regarding 

 Reaumur's three insects as distinct species, though he appears to be mistaken in referring 

 to him under N. favus, as the saw-fly of the currant and gooseberry is not wholly yellow. 



