176 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



an alarm was spread in some parts of France, that people 

 had been poisoned by eating worm-eaten peas ; and they 

 were forbidden by authority to be exposed for sale in the 

 market: but the fears of the public were soon removed 

 by the examination of some scientific men, who found 

 the cause of the injury to be the insect of which I am now 

 speaking 3 . Another species of Bruchus (B. pectinicornzs, 

 L.) devours the peas in China and Barbary. A legumi- 

 nous seed, much used when boiled as food for horses in 

 India, known to Europeans by the name of Gram, but in 

 the Tamul dialect called Koloo, and by the Moors Cooltee, 

 is the appropriate food of a fourth kind of Bruchus, re- 

 lated to the last, but having the antennae, which in the male 

 are pectinated, much shorter than the body. It is, per- 

 haps, B. scutellaris, F. A parcel of this seed 5 given me 

 by Captain Green was foil of this insect, several grains con- 

 taining two. Molina, in his History of Chili, tells us of 

 a beetle, which he names Lucanus Pihnus, that infests the 

 beans in that country; — a circumstance quite at variance 

 with the habits of the Lucanidce, which all prey upon tim- 

 ber. This insect was probably a Phaleria, Latr., in which 

 genus the mandibles are protruded from the head like 

 those of Lucanus; and one species, as we have seen above, 

 feeds upon maize. 



Great profits are sometimes derived by farmers from 

 their crops of clover-seed : but this does not happen very 

 often; for a small weevil, {Apion jlavifemoratum,) which 

 abounds every where at almost all times of the year, feeds 

 upon the seed of the purple clover, and in most seasons 



a Amoreux, 288. 



b I have raised plants from this seed, which appear from the foliage 

 to belong either to Phaseolus or Dotichos. 



