INSECTS AFFECTING CEREALS, ETC. 



125 



the farmhouse in our grandmothers' day. It also sometimes gets Into 

 dried beans and peas, chocolate, black pepper, powdered coffee, licorice, 

 peppermint, almonds, and seeds of every description. 



The subject of injuries wrought by this species has formed the text 

 of a considerable literature, going back to the year 1721, when Pastor 

 Frisch found the larva feeding upon rye bread, and including, besides 

 damage of the nature referred to, injury to drawings and paintings, 

 manuscripts and books. Some singular instances are recorded of* its 

 injuries as a bookworm. The late Dr. Ilagen wrote that he once saw 

 "a whole shelf of theological books, two hundred years old, traveled 

 through transversely" by the larva of this insect, and still another 

 record is published of injury by this species, or Pt inns fur, to twenty- 

 seven folio volumes, which it is said were "perforated in a straight line 

 by one and the same insect, and so regular was the tunnel that a string 

 could be passed through the whole length of it 

 and the entire set of books lifted up at once."' 



In pharmacies it runs nearly the whole gamut 

 o'f everything kept in store, from insipid gluten 

 wafers to such acrid substances as wormwood, 

 from the aromatic cardamom and anise to the 

 deadly aconite and belladonna. It is particularly 

 abundant in roots, such as orris and flag, and 

 sometimes infests cantharides. 



It is recorded to have established a colony in a 

 human skeleton which had been dried with the 

 ligaments left on, and the writer has seen speci- 

 mens taken from a mummy. It has even been 

 said to perforate tin foil and sheet lead, and that 

 it will "eat anything except cast iron." In short, 

 a whole chapter could be devoted to the food material of this insect, as 

 nothing seems to come amiss to it and its voracious larva. The sub- 

 ject may conclude with the statement that this Division has received 

 complaints from three different correspondents of injury to gun wad- 

 ding, and there are several records of injury to boots and shoes and 

 sheet cork. 



The larvae bore into hard substances like roots, tunneling them in 

 every direction, and feed also upon the powder which soon forms and 

 is cast out of their burrows. In powdery substances the larva 1 form 

 little round balls or cells, which become cocoons, in which they undergo 

 transformation to pupae and then to the adult insect. I have reared 

 the insect from egg to beetle in two months, and as it habitually lives 

 in artificially heated buildings and breeds out through the winter 

 months, there may be at least four broods in a moderately warm 

 atmosphere. 



Minute as is this beetle, it is preyed upon by a still smaller parasite. 

 a chalcis ily known as Meraporus calandrce Bow., which pursues its 



Fig. 62.— Sitodrepa panicea: 

 Headof larva, shown above; 

 leg of larva below — much 

 enlarged (original). 



