286 FIELD, FOREST AND FARM 



fore inherited an old appellation which fails to indi- 

 cate fully the seriousness of the creature's depreda- 

 tions. 



"This last-named insect is a tiny yellowish louse, 

 plump of body, but hardly discernible to untrained 

 eyes, its length being barely three quarters of a milli- 

 meter. It lives in clusters on the minute ramifica- 

 tions of the roots wherever the bark is tender enough 

 to enable it to push in its sucker. Its ranks are so 

 dense that the infested rootlets wear a continuous 

 coating of vermin which stains the fingers with yel- 

 low. It lays its eggs in little heaps in the interstices 

 that occur in the swarming colony; and these eggs 

 are oval in shape and sulphur-yellow at first, but 

 turn brownish as the moment for hatching ap- 

 proaches. 



' ' From these eggs there come, in a few days, new 

 layers of eggs, which settle down beside the earlier 

 comers and add their own progeny to the already 

 overgrown family. Thus, as long as the season con- 

 tinues favorable, these myriad numbers of successive 

 generations are added to the existing myriads, until 

 the thread-like rootlets become completely hidden 

 by the accumulated layers of eggs and the eggs them- 

 selves. 



"Riddled with punctures, the rootlets swell up 

 at intervals and present the appearance of a string 

 of elongated seeds. Thus deformed, fatally injured 

 in their delicate suckers, the roots cease to imbibe 

 the nutritive juices of the soil, the famished vine Ian- 



