The Tea inseeh of India. 51 



closely applied to the wounded spots in order that the buccal pump may act as effec- 

 tually as possible, tlian that the latter perforin the double duty of lancets and rete'u. 

 tjve ho!)ks. 



" The Tea-Mite is an excessively minute animal, the female measuring only about 

 one twenty-fifth of an inch, or about one millimetre, in length between the extremities 

 of the outstretched anterior and posterior group of legs, and the male being about one- 

 sixth smaller. The egg-shaped bo ly is divided, except when inflated to its fullest extent 

 by imbibed tea juices, by distinct grooves into six divisions in the female and into 

 seven in the male ; and each of these divisions, as to which it is exceedingly doubtful 

 whether they represent true segments, bears two pairs of long and stifE and backward- 

 ly directed white hairs, forming four longitudinal series placed two on each outer third 

 of the u]Dper surface ; the first segment, which has only one pair of hairs, and is moreover 

 longer in the male than iu the female, carries, in both sexes, two groups of two unequal 

 eyes, forming two pairs, one of whicli, the anterior, is smaller than the other. 



" To the naked eye the Tea-Mite appears as a dull blood-red speck, but under the 

 microscope presents itself as a much brighter and more variously coloured object, its legs 

 being of a pale flesh-colour adorned with a light crimson stripe, the front segment of the 

 body bright crimson with a semi-circular murk in the middle of its hinder margin, con- 

 colorous and in contact with the deep blood-red of all the remaining segments in the 

 femsile, which is dark blood-red from the front end of the second segment to the 

 extremity of the body, but of the foui following segments only in the male, which ha& 

 the two terminal segments bright crimson, like the front of the bod^'. The legs are 

 sparingly clothed with long and colourless hairs, and they are all terminated on each 

 side by one or two curved bristles and in the middle by a single hooked claw, on either 

 side of which there spring from the apex of the terminal joint of every limb two 

 delicate glassy threads with enlarged tips, forming long and thin-stalked suckers, by 

 tlie aid of which the mites are enabled to retain their footing and to walk securely 

 over the leaves, and the males to clasp the females firmly by the back during copula- 

 tion. In crushed specimens which had been rendered transparent by reagents, a pair 

 of highly refractive and spheroidal solid bodies having a, faint concentric structure 

 was always to be made out beneath the skin in front of and internal to the eyes, iu 

 a position, therefore, corresponding as closely as possible with that in which Claparede 

 never failed to find in embryos, but only in embryos, of T. telarius, a pair of sacs 

 each containing a pear-shaped solid body. 



'•■ I propose for the Tea-Mite, which would appear to be unknown to science, the 

 name of Tetranychus bioculatus in allusion to its double (really two pairs of) eyes. 



" The Tea-Mite, so far as I have been able to make out, usually first affects small 

 patches consisting of a few bushes, whence it rapidly extends over the whole or a 

 iaro-e part of a garden. It always seemed to me to consist of numerically larger and 

 more active societies on the bushes of very old gardens, from which it never appeared 

 to be entirely absent, as vigorous societies were to be obtained therefrom »s often as 

 I wanted fresh material for my observations. 



" The view entertained by many planters that this pest is carried to gardens and 

 distributed over them by insect agency does not receive the least support from my 

 observations. Moreover, the analogy of the closely-allied European species, 1. telarius, 

 is wholly opposed to such a notion, which doubtless owes its origin to the Tea-Mite 

 having been mistaken for some one of the numerous red or reddish-yellow Mites 

 belonging to totally different groups, which do commonly occur parasitically on the 

 outside of the bodies of the most diverse groups of insects— a kind of parasitism which 

 is of snch common occurrence that I have rarely if ever sorted the contents of a 



E Si 



