Jan. 1, 1865.] 



SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



15 



ENTOMOLOGY. 



To KILL Insects in Greenhouses. — Mr. ^Y. W. 

 Saunders stated, at a recent meeting of tlie Entomo- 

 logical Society, that for some years he had used 

 spirits of wine in his greenhouses for cleansing 

 plants and clearing them from insects ; he mixed 

 the rectified spirits and pure water in equal propor- 

 tions, and this mixture, which was found to answer 

 better than undiluted spirit, was applied with a 

 brush. It was very efficacious in the destruction of 

 the common mealy bug (especially when young) and 

 other common pests, and he recommended it as 

 worthy of application in the greenhouse generally. 



SiMALL ToBTOiSESHELL Btjttehtly.— "The larvE8 

 of this insect {Vanessa Urticce), and, I surmise, of 

 the genus Vanessa in general, are remarkably 

 exempt from the attacks of Ichneumons. Thus I 

 collected (at random front various places), last 

 July, about forty nearly adult larvse of this insect. 

 Every one of these became a pupa, and emerged 

 in due time. I observe that in rearing butterfly 

 larvse, if from insufficient or inappropriate food 

 they have not attained their due size when tlicy 

 enter the pupa state, they make their appearance 

 thereafter with the wings perfect, but are of 

 diminutive size. With moths, on the contrary, 

 under the like circumstances, the wings are 

 shrivelled and imperfect." — The 'Entomologist. 



Death to Elies ! — A grocer in Cathcart-street, 

 Glasgow, being annoyed at the superabundance of 

 the fly tribe in his shop, and being of a speculative 

 turn of mind, invested in a halfpenny fly-paper, 

 which he placed in the window, on a plate and a 

 bttle water. After it had lain thus for a week, on 

 the usual turn over of the window on Wednesday 

 afternoon, an immense number of dead flies were 

 collected from it. Astonished at the result, 

 curiosity led the young man to put them in the 

 scale, when he found their combined weight to be 

 two ounces and a quarter. He thereafter tried two 

 drams weight, and on counting them found there 

 were 600 in it. Thus upon calculation it appeared 

 that the two ounces and a quarter would contain 

 10,800 dead fhes. Besides these, it is considered that 

 nearly half as many more would be dusted out of 

 the window during the week, making a grand total 

 of 15,000 of the tribe slaughtered in a week by 

 this housewife's benefactor. — Glasgoio Morning 

 Journal. 



Galls. — At the meeting of the Entomological 

 Society, held November 7th, Mr. W. W. Saunders 

 exhibited some galls which he had recently found on 

 the roots of an oak tree, at a depth of four feet below 

 the surface, and from, which had since emerged a 

 number of specimens of a Cynips (C. aptera ?), the 



whole of which were females. Also three other 

 kinds of gall, which he had found in Switzerland, 

 two of them upon species of willow, and the third 

 formed on the leaves of the beech. Mr. Staiuton 

 also exhibited a gall of a woolly texture, found on 

 an oak near Bath. 



Sheep-rot or LiVER-rLUKE. — The rot in sheep 

 is but too well known as one of the most destructive 

 pests connected with what may be termed the 

 animal economy of agriculture. Its ravages have 

 been in some seasons so extensive as to produce a 

 scarcity in the kind of stock which constitutes the 

 most general and wholesome kind of our ordinary 

 animal food, as well as a very important medium in 

 carrying out the necessary rotation of crops. A 

 writer in the Edinburgh Veterinary Review, quoted 

 by Dr. Cobbold, says, that " in the season of 

 1830-31, the estimated deaths of sheep from rot was 

 between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000. Supposing," 

 proceeds our author, " the number to have been 

 1,500,000, this would represent a sum of something 

 like £4,000,000 sterling. ... As instances of its 

 disastrous effects upon the revenues of agricul- 

 turists, we may cite the statements of Duvaine, and 

 also individual cases recorded by Simonds. ' In the 

 neighbourhood of Aries alone, during the year 1S12, 

 no less than 300,000 sheep perished, and at Mmes 

 and Montpelier 90,000. In the inner departments, 

 during the epidemic of the years 1853-54, many 

 cattle-breeders lost a fourth, a third, or even three- 

 fourths of their flocks.' ... On the estate of Mr. 

 Cramp, of the Isle of Thanet, the rot epidemic of 

 1834 swept away £3,000 worth of his sheep in less 

 than three months, compelling him to give up his 

 farm. Scores of cases are on record where our 

 English farmers have lost three, four, five, six, 

 seven, and even eight hundred sheep in a single 

 season, and many agriculturists have thus become 

 completely ruined." It is superfluous to inform our 

 readers that all this wholesale and ruinous mischief 

 is the effect of the existence of the " liver-fluke " 

 {Fasciola hepatica) in the liver of the animal. The 

 number of flukes inhabiting a single sheep's liver is 

 sometimes very considerable. " Bidloo obtained 

 800, Leuwenhoeck about 900, and Duprey upwards 

 of 1,000 specimens. The bile contained in the 

 liver-ducts is loaded with flukes' eggs. In some 

 cases there cannot be less than tens, or even hun- 

 dreds, of thousands." — Atliencvicm, on Dr. Cobbold's 

 Enfozoa. 



Heroic Names oe Butterflies. — " In the vast 

 multitude of butterflies, the greatest part of which 

 are foreign and extra-European, and to whose food 

 and manner of life we are utter strangers, it was 

 impossible to give significant trivial names. Lin- 

 naeus, therefore, by way of simile, has taken the 

 names of the Equites from the Trojan history. They 



