50 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



actions a proved that Linne was not mistaken in referring 

 it to the former genus. 



The second instance of the insufficiency of popular 

 description is even more extraordinary. In 1 788 an alarm 

 was excited in this country by the probability of import- 

 ing, in cargoes of wheat from North America, the insect 

 known by the name of the Hessian fly, whose dreadful 

 ravages will be adverted to hereafter. However the in- 

 sect tribes are in general despised, they had on that oc- 

 casion ample revenge. The privy council sat day after 

 day anxiously debating what measures should be adopt- 

 ed to ward off the danger of a calamity, more to be 

 dreaded, as they well knew, than the plague or pesti- 

 lence. Expresses were sent off in all directions to the 

 officers of the customs at the different outports respecting 

 the examination of cargoes — dispatches written to the 

 ambassadors in France, Austria, Prussia, and America, 

 to gain that information of the want of which they were 

 now so sensible : and so important was the business 

 deemed, that the minutes of council and the documents 

 collected from all quarters fill upwards of two hundred 

 octavo pages b . Fortunately England contained one il- 

 lustrious naturalist, the most authentic source of infor- 

 mation on all subjects which connect Natural History with 

 Agriculture and the Arts, to whom the privy council had 

 the wisdom to apply ; and it was by Sir Joseph Banks's 

 entomological knowledge, and through his suggestions, 

 that they were at length enabled to form some kind of 



a Swartz in Kong/. Vet. Ac. Nya. band. ix. 40. Plate XXIII. Fig.10. 

 b Young's Annals of Agriculture, xi. 406. 



