$S8 r INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS, 



or mutilate our most highly prized specimens. Ptinus 

 Fur, L. and Byrrhus Musceorum, L., two minute beetles, 

 are amongst the worst, especially the latter, whose sin- 

 gular eliding larva, when once it gets amongst them, 

 makes astonishing havoc, the birds soon shedding their 

 feathers, and the insects falling to pieces. — One of the 

 worst plagues of the entomologist are the mites (Acarus 

 Destructor, Schrank) : these, if his specimens be at all 

 damp, eat up all .the muscular parts, [Lytta vesicatoria 

 being almost the only insect that is not to their taste,) 

 and thus entirely destroy them. — If spiders by any 

 means get amongst them, they will do no little mischief. 

 — Some I have observed to be devoured by a minute 

 moth, perhaps Tinea Insectella, F. ; and in the posterior 

 thighs of a species of Grijllus, F., from China, I 'once 

 found, one in each thigh, a small beetle congenerous 

 with Tenebrio pattens, L. that had devoured the interior. 

 It is, I believe, either Acarus Destructor or eruditus that 

 eats the gum employed to fasten down dried plants. 



There are other insects which do not confine them- 

 selves to one or two articles, but make a general and 

 indiscriminate attack upon our dead stock. Ulloa men- 

 tions one peculiar to Carthagena, called there the come- 

 gen, which he describes as a kind of moth or maggot so 

 minute as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye a . This 

 destroys, says he, the furniture of houses, particularly 

 all kinds of hangings, whether of cloth, linen, or silk, 

 gold or silver stuffs or lace ; in short, every thing except 

 solid metal. It will in a single night ruin all the goods 



S 



of a warehouse in which it has got footing, reducing bales 



a It appears from Humboldt (Personal Narrative, E. T. v. 116.) 

 that the destructive insects called by this name, are Termites. 



