ONISCID.^,. 9 



CASE scavengers, clearing away both vegetable and animal detritus ; but 

 they do not confine themselves to dead or decaying matter. They 

 also attack living plants, peaches, melons, mushrooms, and any- 

 thing that is juicy, doing more mischief by disfiguring the fruit 

 than by the quantity they consume. They are also very partial 

 to orchids, eating the young fibrils of the roots, especially of such 

 as Cattleyas, that require to be kept dry when not in active 

 growth, but which, nevertheless, make a good deal of root-growth 

 at that period. When numerous they will destroy almost every 

 root that is made on the surface of the pots, rendering the 

 growth which follows small and weak. To them, too, is often 

 due the loss of some spreading plants in the open border, such as 

 saxifrages, primroses, strawberries, &c., which afford a shelter for 

 them under the cover of their leaves. When a plant of this habit 

 is seen to languish and droop, an examination under the covering 

 leaves will often show a family of young Onisci sheltered by them 

 which have eaten all round the neck of the root. 



They are difficult to dislodge from our hot-houses, for wherever 

 a crevice or chink exists there they find shelter, and they even 

 make galleries through the sphagnum and moss in which some 

 orchids are grown. No wholesale mode of destroying them is 

 known. They must be cut off in detail, and the same sort of 

 contrivances which are had recourse to to entrap earwigs and 

 surface larvae must be used against them. Scooped-out potatoes 

 or apples, placed like little domes, into which they can creep up, 

 or put into pots under a little moss and little heaps of decaying 

 plants, turfs, or pots filled with horse droppings in a half dry state 

 (to which they are very partial), may be left in the houses at 

 night and examined, and the creatures destroyed, every morning, 

 and so by care and attention their numbers may be thinned ; but 

 they are so numerous and universally distributed that no complete 

 cure can be looked for, fresh recruits constantly coming in from 

 without. The walls of the orchard and of the houses should be 

 carefully pointed to remove the crevices in which they hide. 



